[Disclaimer: this is not a dog training post.]

 

I saw a woman lying in the middle of the street. She was curled up like you’d do when spooning someone. Only there was no one to spoon. 

 

The street was a freeway. I was on a bus – the first vehicle that stopped after a motorcycle ran her over. Her feet were naked. Her skirt had slipped up, revealing her lower legs and bare feet. 

 

Should I get off the bus and make sure she got to a hospital? 

 

She was facing away from us. “Dios mío,” whispered the woman sitting next to me. The sun was shining.  

 

A friend, a lawyer, once told me, “If you ever hit someone in Guatemala, run.” What if the guy on the motorcycle had received the same advice?

 

His motorcycle was parked on the side of the road. He was fine. He was making a phone call. He wasn’t going to run. And, just like that, I decided to stay on the bus. 

 

The woman in the street slowly lifted an arm. Just a for a second; then it dropped back down. It was the only movement I had seen since we stopped.

 

“She’s fine”, said the driver. “She’s moving.”

 

(I’ve seen the mouth of a sheep open and close a minute after separating the head from the body. Clearly, moving an arm doesn’t prove you are fine.)

 

And we continued on, the bus leaning into the turns so you had to hold on to your seat with two hands, blasting reggeaton.

 

Later that day, I asked a friend what would happen to the woman. She had no shoes. She certainly had no insurance.

 

“They’ll take her to the Hospitál Nacional,” said my friend. “It’s free.”

 

“Will they do a good job there?”

 

“They won’t,” he said. “If she gets there alive, and she’s badly injured, she’ll die.”

 

I thought of Peter Singer. He holds that there is no moral difference between walking past a dying person in the street, and choosing not to think of all the dying people in far away places. 

 

It’s morally outrageous to see footage of someone walk past a dying person in the street. We all believe we would stop. (We can’t know if we would. I’d have said I would stop – but I stayed on that bus.)

 

The thing is: there was no good reason to stay on the bus. If someone is lying in the middle of a freeway, and no one stops the oncoming traffic … How long until they get run over again, this time for good? I’ve seen cats and dogs on that freeway, flat like sheets of paper. There was no breakdown triangles, no traffic cones, and no one was stopping cars for this woman. I could have stopped cars for her, had I gotten off the bus.

 

I suppose Peter Singer is right. There is no moral difference: maybe we’re just as bad up close as we are at great distances.