We must make time for goodness
LORNA DUECK
Executive producer, Listen Up TV
11/21/2007

The most important inquiry into the death of Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski is the one we need to conduct on ourselves.  What’s gone wrong with our country that we weren’t able to muster a Good Samaritan for either Robert, or his mother, Zofia Cisowski?   How can a mom pace the Vancouver airport for six hours, going from kiosk to kiosk (six times to one information desk alone) asking for help to reach her son less than 100 meters away, and then drive away from the airport in the seventh hour thinking Robert must simply not have arrived?  Our red tape has strangled us.  In this debacle we have the technology to show our errant ways to a watching world, but we don’t know how to download the old fashioned human touch   My guess is we’ll now spend millions on four Inquiries called into a tragedy which had such ordinary beginnings it should never have required the RCMP to attend to.  All we needed was a few good people to help a confused family, instead we discover all throughout this heartbreak, we are not exercised in goodness, and our own focus on boundaries and time pressures made us weak on virtue.  This is the undeniable truth that has raised more than an international eyebrow at the behaviour of Canada in this airport incident.

Robert Dziekanski was right when he wrote to his mother about the inconvenience and hard work of being good.  In a July 2006 note to his mother that was read at his eulogy on the weekend, Mr. Dziekanski said;   “People become good by doing good; it is rare that a person is good by nature alone… goodness does not flow from a place of weakness but one of power.”  Ultimately we will learn that after several hours had passed, bystanders in the airport that day likely lost the power to diffuse a catastrophe in the making, as we see on the tape in one attempt, a bystander in the escalated hour tried valiantly, but lacked power.  Ms. Cisowski’s last words of assurance to her son that there would always be Polish speaking people around to help him were also useless.

There is a moment of concealed power on the video tape that captured the last ten minutes of Mr. Dziekanski’s life; it’s when someone close to the recording device utters “Jesus Christ” in a state of expletive shock.  This same Jesus is the originator of the parable of the Good Samaritan,  (Luke 10:29-37), the classic helping story that used to be so common in culture it made its way into the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology for analysis on what does it take for people to help someone in distress.  Princeton University’s renowned professor of Psychology John Darley and Dr. C. Daniel Batson took several research hypothesis from the Good Samaritan story and tested them on hurried Seminary students. In results that are somewhat legendary among clergy today, they empirically proved the point Jesus may have been teaching; “ethics becomes a luxury as the speed of our daily lives increases.”  Their study points out that because the Samaritan was socially less important than the power figures in the story, he was likely operating on a quite different time schedule,  “One can imagine the priest and Levite, prominent public figures, hurrying along with little black books full of meetings and appointments, glancing furtively at their sundials,”  wrote Darley and Baston.    The study acknowledges that when people are caught between a stranger’s crisis and a schedule which depends on someone needing them to be somewhere, it is “conflict, rather than callousness” that causes a person to ignore the stranger.   They go on to conclude that when we are in a hurry we “narrow our cognitive map”, in other words, we just don’t get it that a simple, “can I help you” can really save someone’s day.

Robert Dziekanski was right, it is rare that a person can be good to others by nature alone, and we’ve made it harder with the all the extra’s we’ve added to our lives to slow down and be the kind of people we want to be.  From hurried travelers to time pressured airport staff, to RCMP who valued efficiency over compassion, the family and friends of this Polish immigrant have paid a high price to remind us of the obvious truth that neighbourliness takes more time we may have budgeted for.

Lorna Dueck is the Executive Producer of  Listen Up TV,  a spiritual perspective on news and current events seen Sunday mornings at 11 a.m. on Global  TV.   www.listenuptv.com