Metro story moves

Vanessa Rodrigues wrote a very inspirational letter [“Metro madness!” Jan. 25] and I just wanted to add a personal appeal in addition to her “plea.”

While reading her anecdote, my heart skipped a couple beats and I had goose bumps all over. A couple months ago, I was leaving the parking lot of the Rockland shopping centre and was at a three-way stop intersection. There was a visually impaired middle-aged gentleman trying to cross the street. Everyone was taking their turns crossing and turning at the intersection. The poor guy would take a couple steps off the sidewalk, feel a car zip by him and he’d stumble back onto the sidewalk. There were still about three cars in front of me; I got out of my car and told him that I was going to help him cross the street. I asked him to hold on to my arm while I forced the still-turning cars to stop and let the gentleman get to the other side.

He was clearly sight-impaired, and God knows how long he had been standing there. Our society has become so self-centred and haughty that people literally either overlook situations like this, or, as Rodrigues said, “stand there like deer in headlights.”

I am sure Rodrigues didn’t want to come across as a superhero, and this is definitely not my purpose either—all I want to say is it takes mere seconds of our time to help someone. And those seconds can change their lives forever.

>> Siddiqa Sadiq, Chateauguay

A sincere thanks to Vanessa Rodrigues for her letter and the Mirror for printing it. When I got to the part that read: “My immediate reaction upon seeing [the young lady] land in the middle of the track was to run like hell to the big red SOS phone, pick it up and yell at the person on the other end to stop the train,” I skipped to the end of the letter to see if the writer was a man or a woman. “Vanessa.” Yes! Let’s hear it for the brave, implicated sisterhood!

Over a year ago, I was sitting at the back of a bus when an altercation broke out about a third of the way down. I looked up immediately to see if I should intervene—because I firmly believe that sitting in silence is tantamount to condoning whatever is going on—but before I could move, a young woman in her twenties who was sitting closer to the action than I was took charge of the situation. She calmed down the group of excited young men, there was no further aggression, and they got off at the next stop.

I was so impressed that I went and asked her how she had the courage and authority to act that way. She said she was a kindergarten teacher and was used to dealing with over-stimulated youth. I salute the women out there on our public transit system whose self-confidence and principled behaviour make Montreal a better place to live!

>> Diana Halfpenny

The huge number of people killed and injured in the Montreal metro system forms an immense tragedy and scandal that has yet to become a public issue.An article in the Sept. 1999 issue of the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, by Brian Mishara, reports that 129 people committed suicide in the metro system from 1986 to 1998, out of a total of 151 metro deaths. If we extrapolate from this to the entire 41-year history of the metro, we can see that the total number killed on the tracks is probably in the hundreds, with several thousands injured. It is morally scandalous that this is permitted to continue and that very little has been done to restructure the system to prevent anyone from being struck down on the tracks. That this situation continues says very little for our mainstream media and political leaders at any level.

>> Shloime Perel

Scavenger story stirs

Patrick Lejtenyi’s Jan. 11 article, “Life on the Trash Heap,” about photographer Paul-Antoine Picard’s photo exhibit was truly poignant. I hope many people will go see the show.Sadly, more than a billion people in the world live on less than $1 a day. The poor in Quebec can depend on social programs for their basic needs, and only some poor people scavenge here on a full-time basis, but the indigent and the handicapped in many poor countries receive no such social assistance from the government.It should be mentioned that in Somalia and a number of other war-beleaguered nations, many injured military veterans and those disabled by land mines turn to scavenging garbage dumps to just survive. In Africa, thousands of impoverished AIDS orphans, who have no adults to turn to for financial support, become garbage foragers.And, of course, there is massive intergenerational poverty in parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America that makes garbage scavenging a full-time job for hordes of people.Instead of turning up one’s nose at garbage scavengers, one ought to realize that were it not for them, the garbage dumps would be even larger.

>> Manish Patwari

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