Make Sure Your Contribution Is Helpful

Dear Miss Manners: In a market checkout line I met an acquaintance whom I know to be in an abusive marriage. She was with one of her three young children, and she had a black eye.

After greeting me, she launched into an elaborate explanation about how she got her “bruise,” involving an accident while her little boy was learning to swing a baseball bat. I pretended to believe her, saying “Oh my, he must have felt worse than you did.”

As we were leaving the store, still chatting, a woman who had been ahead of us in line handed my acquaintance a business card and said, “It is never too late to make a change.” Then she walked off through the parking lot. The card was for a free counseling program for battered women.

After showing it to me in disgust, she tore it up, fuming about the “incredible rudeness” and “insane assumptions” made by this stranger. She was also furious to be offered “free” anything, as she and her husband are well-off financially. I agreed that the stranger had certainly jumped to conclusions after overhearing a conversation.

But was she rude? Where do you draw the line between an attempt at a humanitarian act and insensitive intrusiveness? And if the stranger wasn’t being rude, where does that leave me, who for the sake of courtesy pretends a dangerous situation does not exist?

Gentle Reader: What the stranger was practicing is what Miss Manners thinks of as hit-and-run compassion, a form of do-goodism that is extremely popular now.

It has the advantage of being easier than the traditional method of helping people, which involves finding out exactly what each person’s problem is and weighing many factors, including that person’s psychological state, in order to find a solution that might work in the particular case.

The disadvantage of hit-and-run, as in the case you observed, is that the only person it may leave feeling good is the do-gooder. The person who is hit, who may or may not have been in bad shape, may be left feeling worse.

So the stranger failed to commit a humanitarian act; although she was more discreet than many who make such attempts, she simply embarrassed your acquaintance. That is not a help.

Nevertheless, Miss Manners deeply appreciates your feeling bad about ignoring what you do know to be a dangerous situation, although you did so exactly for the sake of sparing the lady the pain of embarrassment.

The essential point here is to make a distinction between observing trouble and being able to do something about it. For example, if you saw someone have an accident on the street and you could do something useful - administer help or call for it - you should feel obligated to do so. But if there was nothing you could do - if more skilled help were already at work - you should feel obligated to get out of the way and refrain from gawking.

Perhaps there is something you can do for your acquaintance. You may not know her well enough to be taken into her confidence, but as you know that the marriage is abusive, you must know someone who does. If you can prompt someone to help her, or gain her confidence enough to help her yourself, you would be doing a kindness. But do not feel that you should have contributed to her embarrassment when you had nothing else to contribute.

xxxx

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Judith Martin United Features Syndicate