A homeless, and most likely moneyless, man finds a package filled with cash and traveller's cheques totalling $42,000 and turns it in to the authorities. I'm kind of unsure if I would have done the same thing so that makes him a much better person than I am. I know that if I kept the windfall I would suffer from a bad conscience for the rest of my life so, on retrospect, I probably would return it.
The homeless man had no hesitation, though, and that still makes him a better person than I am. We tend to think of all homeless people as society's losers in life but none of us really know what circumstances put these people on the streets. There's sure to be honest and decent people among them who have been kicked harder in the butt by life than any of us luckier ones.
It's proven to us over and over that you can't judge a book by it's cover. There are serial killers who appear to be pillars of society and then there are some of the homeless who appear to be nothing but bums. You never know what gems you'll find or where you'll find them.
It isn't easy to retrain our brains to refrain from having instant assumptions about people we really know nothing about. Maybe if we just stop for a moment and take the time to reconsider then we might come to entirely different conclusions.
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