to be human

Jun 1, 2012

A front-page Press story today told of two Christchurch people who found almost $60.000 in coins on a Christchurch street.

What would you do?

The writer almost seemed a bit surprised that the finders had no hesitation in immediately calling the police. It seems they did not even think for a moment of running off with a few coins.

The hint in the article was that their honesty was a rare and unusual thing; that it would have perhaps been more ‘human’ to experience and submit to a temptation to steal in this situation.

In fact the two who found the coins simply did what was human. Their behaviour was not super-human. To do anything less than report their find would have been ‘sub-human’.

I am grateful to Jaime and Tane for their witness to the beauty of ordinary human behaviour, and to the Press for sharing the story.

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