Follow your heart with people who are not dangerous. It is rarely a mistake.
Years ago I picked up an old woman hitchhiking in a blizzard. She lived about ten miles out of my way, but it wasn't difficult to make the decision to take her home. Upon my asking how she got caught out in the weather, she named a prominent family whose home she had just cleaned.
"Why didn't Mrs. xxxx take you home?"
"Oh, the weather was too bad."
"But it is okay for you to hitch hike in it, right?"
Silence.
Then she started telling me her story. In 1945 she married a US soldier and followed him here where he worked in the mines until he got sick and died. Her social security check was $355/m and at 73 she supplemented by working for the quality in the area.
About twenty minutes later in white-out conditions we pulled up to her house. An old "company" house with that cheap tar siding with red brick imprints, a ramshackle porch and maybe ten feet of yard to the sidewalk. Like my own parents, this woman had survived a depression and a world war at twenty-couple; something about her moved me. I handed her some money, closed my hand around hers to keep it there and thanked her for telling me her story.
She looked at me, then looked away. She opened the door, slid off the white leather seats and carefully shut a door that probably cost more than any appliance in her home.
Within two weeks the daughter of the family who let her hitch hike home had been arrested for marijuana possession. In a heartbeat their daughter lost a $60k/yr job in a very public way. If more Americans took care of bad people harshly, this would be a much better nation.
