Nice People

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I saw an add on TV the other day in which people were trying to help others, and not only was the help not accepted, those being offered help ran from it. Bottom line in the add: Nice people, what do we do with them? Then it gave a web address to go to in order to find a manual for interacting with ‘nice people’.

It makes me wonder, how did we get to a point where we need a manual to interact with ‘nice people’? I can understand a need for a manual on ‘interaction with others’. But why the manual on what to do with ‘nice people’; what is it about ‘nice people’ that seems to be so scary that we want to run from them? That we rather get lost when we are going some place, than accept the help offered by a ‘nice person’?

A couple of things come to mind.
First, we value our individuality a great deal; gearing our society toward meeting our individual needs. So when someone walks up to us offering help, it may be construed as a sign that we are failing in our individual expression of who we are and where we want to go; as a sign of defeat. Yet it seems to run deeper than that. When someone walks up to us offering to help us, even when we are struggling with what we are doing, a deep seated sense of fear and mistrust makes it almost impossible for us to accept the help offered.

The fact that this is something so widespread that it is worth making a TV add about, is food for thought.

It tells us a number of things:
We fear and mistrust other people, especially those we don’t know.
We don’t trust an helping hand as a genuine offer.
We feel that an offer like that is meant as an ‘opening bid’ to take advantage of us.
We may not want to be a nice person ourselves and offer help to others.

In other words, we believe that if we accept the offer, bad things are going to happen to us.
Or, at least we may be inconvenienced if someone would request our help...

Unfortunately, there have been cases where that has been true. Where the helping hand offered was nothing more than a scam, a setup to get ‘a foot in the door’ which in some instances has lead to truly horrific outcomes...

On the other hand, there are a lot of really nice people in the world who would really like to help someone who needs it.

The ultimate question then becomes whether we want to let our interaction with other people be dictated by fear and mistrust, or if we will use our common sense and react to the facts of the situation first?
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