Dan Rather THERE ARE two stories I've been thinking about lately. The first happened to a reporter covering news in Haiti, one of the poorest nations on earth. This reporter had muddied up his jeans and, in a quick break between shoots, stopped in at the hotel where he was staying to change. He left the pants in the room, with instructions that they were to be washed.
Getting a story to air can be something of a high-wire act in a foreign country. It doesn't take many trips abroad before the correspondent learns that one needs to be ready for any contingency - last-minute equipment replacements, on-the-spot hires and baksheesh in all its forms. One learns to carry a good supply of cash at all times, usually in hard currency. Good old US greenbacks.
Our reporter had US$3,000 worth of said currency in the pocket of his jeans. In an epic moment of numskullery, he failed to remove the cash when he left the hotel room.
Time to come clean: The reporter was yours truly. And I didn't realise I had lost the money until I returned to the hotel room to find the jeans lying on the bed, cleaned and pressed, with an envelope sitting on top - an envelope containing US$3,000 and a note explaining where the money was found.
In Haiti, the average annual income is somewhere between US$250 and US$300. So the sum I left in my pocket no doubt represented at least 10 years of earnings for the woman who washed my pants. Seeing it returned before I even realised it was missing was humbling.
The other story is shorter but follows the same theme. It involves a colleague who was new to New York and a taxi driver who was new to the country. Her destination reached, the passenger dug into her purse and pulled out a bill to pay the fare. The driver took the bill, looked at it, then handed it back. "I do not think you meant to give me this, miss," he said. Instead of a US $10, she had inadvertently given the driver a US $100.
This week, we received disturbing hints that the Washington D.C. area sniper might not be acting strictly out of mental illness, but might be driven instead by a desire to extort cash through serial murder. We are inundated by images of hatred and violence taken to extremes in Indonesia, the Philippines, the Middle East and here at home. We hear that American prosperity has ceased to be the subject of worldwide aspiration and has become a cause for murderous resentment. And we cannot escape the realisation that there is truth in this.
But we should take care not to mistake the terrible actions of a few for the intentions of the many. Ideologies are not people. People are more complex than any one agenda, set of beliefs or manifesto.
Individuals are also simpler than any of these things. They are not mere vessels for creed, country or cause. Most of us, the world around, simply are; we are fathers and mothers, friends and brothers, sisters and sons.
And no matter where you find them, the overwhelming majority of people are still good. Not saintly, far from perfect, but good. Like the New York cabby, like the Haitian laundry woman, they can be counted on to do the right thing when the situation arises, and to do it reflexively.
Profound? Hardly, and your reporter knows it. But it might be worth remembering just about now. The snipers, terrorists and extortionists grab the headlines, but the good people have them outnumbered. By far.
Dan Rather is a television news anchor. Copyright 2002 DJR Inc. Distributed by King Features Syndicate.
