Past the Mission

In the last month, there have been two rapes in the general vicinity of our office building. One was right outside the grocery store across the street at 4 in the afternoon. The other one happened when a man simply got in the car of a girl going up one of our adjacent streets. They think it was the same man. But they haven't caught him yet.

The building isn't in the best part of town. So there are some really odd ducks that wander through our parking lot on a regular basis. And mostly we just talk about them and make fun of them. Like the guy who used to wander through the back parking lot with a forty in his hand and yell at us about how we never did any work.

But tonight, I went out for one last cigarette and there was a woman sitting on one of our brick planters about 100 yards from me. She was yelling to me about how her car had run out of gas and she needed some money to put gas in it to get home. Now... Who knows if this is true or not. I don't. But the last thing she yelled was, "I know you're scared. I'm scared, too..."

And she was right. I was scared. Maybe if someone else had been out smoking with me, I wouldn't have been as frightened. And I wanted so badly to go across the parking lot and give her some money for gas. (And again, who knows if she really needed gas.) If I were home in Alaska, I wouldn't have thought twice about it. But I wasn't home in Alaska. I was in South Lansing, the rape capital of the city.

It made me really sad. But I don't know which I'd rather feel: Safe or helpful. In many cases, it's easy to be safe and helpful at the same time. But this time... Would it really have been worth the risk? Even though it hurt me in a fundamental place not to help?