If We Do Not Stop to Help

One reader offered to anonymously send the family a Safeway debit card. A nonprofit program that provides support for teenage girls weighed in with information and advice. So did the Capital Area Food Bank.

On the evening before his assassination in April 1968, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. took to a pulpit in Memphis to deliver what became his final sermon. He asked the congregation to develop "a kind of dangerous unselfishness" in the face of need.

King told the parable of the good Samaritan. It was about a man lying on the side of the road, having been preyed upon and beaten by thieves. Two men, walking down the road, saw the fallen man, but each passed by on the other side.

King reflected on why the two men didn't stop. Were they too busy? Was there some rule or custom that prevented them from touching a human body?

"It's possible," King speculated, "that the priest and the Levite looked over that man on the ground and wondered if the robbers were still around."

"Or it's possible," King continued, "that they felt the man on the ground was merely faking, and he was acting like he had been robbed and hurt, in order to . . . lure them there for quick and easy seizure."

King might also have included the possibility that the two men passed by on the other side of the road because they believed the man might have done something to bring trouble upon himself.

King said he imagined the first question the two men asked was, "If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?"

"But then the good Samaritan came by," King said, "and he reversed the question: 'If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?' "

That was the unstated question before people on Mother's Day. Some, like the angry readers, saw only C.C.'s deep flaws. Others, however, saw her humanity. And, like the good Samaritan exhibiting a dangerous unselfishness in the face of need, they stopped to give C.C. a hand.

kingc@washpost.com