The following crazy story came straight from the recent frost wave that hit Chicago: Candice Payne, a 34-year-old Chicago resident, returned home last week when the terrible cold snap began in the United States. On the way, she passed homeless people living in tents in Chicago: "The temperature started to drop, I knew they were going to sleep on ice and I had to do something," she said.
Candice contacted hotels in the city and booked about 30 rooms from her credit card. She then posted on her Instagram account that she needed help with vehicles to transport people from the frozen tents to the hotel. Within minutes, people volunteered, and during the day, a fleet of vehicles arrived and transported dozens of homeless people to the hotel.
People who came across the post enlisted and rented more rooms in hotels in the city, and thus the initiative that started with Candice, saved more than 100 people, some of them children and pregnant women: "I'm a normal person, it sounds like someone rich did it but I'm just a black girl from the south of the city, we can do it together."
And I ask myself: How many people do I know who were really willing to do this noble act? And what about me? Would I be willing to iron out the credit card to save a hundred people from death?
But the even bigger question:
How did we get to a situation where someone who performs an action that in a parallel world seems so logical, human and self-evident, is considered a heroine because her act is so unusual?
That a person would iron money out of his credit in order to save so many people?
In our world?
Say, Mrs. Candice, is everything good?
