Dave The (Pretty) Good Samaritan

I was on my way to the store, and I was in a bit of a rush because I wanted to get some chili cooking and I did not plan ahead and defrost any meat so I had to buy some unfrozen meat, and while I was driving by the synagogue near the intersection of Third and Benner, I saw an older man sitting on the ground and a woman crouched behind him and their body language was so weird that I stopped the car and got out and asked them if everything was okay . . . and it was not, the man had been visiting the woman-- he drove from Manhattan-- and he was walking back to his car, which was two blocks up, and he felt dizzy and collapsed, but then he said he was feeling better and we tried to get him up, but he collapsed again, so I called 911 and I stayed there until a policewoman came-- and she had actually given him oxygen a few minutes previous and then he seemed okay, and then the ambulance came, so I took off . . . and I might not have stopped in the first place if we hadn't just read an excerpt from Malcolm Gladwell's book The Tipping Point in class, in which Darley and Batson's "Good Samaritan" experiment is described . . . and the gist of the findings are thus: if you are in a hurry, you are less likely to help someone in trouble, even if you are a seminarian about to do a presentation on the parable of "The Good Samaritan"-- fairly ironic, BUT since I knew about the experiment, I was able to short-circuit the impulse to let someone else take care of the issue-- though I was in a rush-- and so I DID stop and help . . . my knowledge of human nature helped me to reverse typical behavior (so I didn't really stop to be helpful, I stopped because I didn't want to behave like the ignorant seminary ding-dongs in the experiment . . . but I did stop and help as much as I could, which makes me a pretty good Samaritan).