It’s easy to get down on humankind.

What with all the rape, murder, torture, larceny, deceit, betrayal, environmental degradation and boy bands, you can’t blame someone for thinking the world is screwed and people are garbage.

That’s easy and that is why it is wrong.

People aren’t garbage. For every sinister rat there are two noble souls.

As one travails life’s gargantuan maze encompassing many dimensions, one stumbles upon countless examples of goodness. Such acts plant seeds for more down the row.

Christmas tends to make people bigger hearted – more forgiving and giving and more open to feeling the love in the world and it can often lead to wonderful things.

I get a steady flow of police news from around the province and as e-KNOW only covers the East Kootenay, I usually don’t pay much attention to the goings on in the Lower Mainland.

But a headline grabbed my attention today: ‘Good Samaritan Definitely Makes The NICE List’ from the North Vancouver RCMP Detachment.

“An honest, heartfelt action by a North Vancouver resident has made Christmas that much easier for a Sunshine Coast couple. On Monday evening, December 23, a Good Samaritan found a wallet in the parking lot of a restaurant on Lonsdale Avenue and turned it in to the North Vancouver RCMP Detachment.

“In the wallet were ID, credit cards and $850 cash belonging to the couple. Police were pleased to contact the rightful owners and advise them of the good deed.”

“This person definitely deserves to be on the ‘NICE’ list this Christmas season,” commented Cpl. Richard De Jong of the North Vancouver RCMP.

Times are enormously tough everywhere it seems and $850 would have come in handy to most people but someone in a major city behaved like a fine small town soul and showed respect and caring toward strangers. May that person be blessed with the sweetest karma!

It reminds me of a time I was traveling with my daughter, who would have been five. We were stopped for the night in Albert Lea, Minnesota and had just finished dinner. I paid for our meal and we walked across the diner parking lot to the adjacent motel where we were staying.

It was reckless of me to spend money on a restaurant meal as I was on a terrifyingly tight budget but it was the first day I had spent with my daughter in a year (she lived in Iowa and spent summers with me in the Columbia Valley) and it seemed worth it to splurge.

Shortly after we returned to our room there was a knock at the door.

I opened it and a red-faced man of about 40 stood there, holding 20 dollar bill toward me. “You dropped this in the restaurant,” he said with a puff.

I reached into my pockets and sure enough, the $20 that was there when I paid our tab was gone. The man smiled. “Didn’t think I’d catch up with you.” He noticed the bill fell from my pocket as I scrabbled for cash to pay the bill. When he realized I didn’t know, he moved to retrieve it. He raced after us to return the money.

Instinctively I offered the money back to the man, wowed by his blazing honesty. He smiled again and politely declined. Wishing us a good evening, he returned to his meal at the restaurant.

It may have only been $20 but every cent I had was spoken for on those trips back then. I would return home from epic road trips across the American and Canadian west and Midwest with nothing left in my wallet or bank account and just enough gas to get home. A few times I had to park in the middle of nowhere America for a day or two until payday arrived, in order to be able to buy the gas to get home.

So such a gesture meant everything to me and whenever I see or hear of honest souls, I believe they cannot be thanked enough.

Yet, shouldn’t we all be so honest?

This is the season when we celebrate a soul whose legacy shone a light on the goodness in men and placed markers for us to find our ways in the dark.

Should you find yourself questioning the good in the heart of humankind – remember that there are millions of examples of it occurring everyday around the world. We all experience ‘wow’ and ‘ah ha’ moments as we move through life.

To all of you, may you come upon an ‘ah ha’ or two and be blessed with a ‘wow’ or three this Christmas.

Ian Cobb and Carrie Schafer/e-KNOW

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