LINCOLN Hall, remember him? He was seen on TV and his picture was on the front page of all our newspapers on May 28.
Lincoln is the Australian mountain climber who survived after being pronounced dead at 8700 metres while climbing down from the summit of Everest.
We don’t hear a word about him now. We presume he is recovering. But the news of his survival was dramatic and wonderful.
However, it brought into stark relief the horror of a lonely death, some days earlier, on the same mountain.
David Sharp was his name. He died under a rock shelf from lack of oxygen and he was passed by as many as 40 climbers, determined to reach the summit.
Some climbers have justified their lack of compassion by saying that David was “effectively dead”, whatever that means.
Sir Edmund Hillary, the Everest pioneer, commented on the tragedy: “On my expedition, there was no way that you would have left a man to die under a rock. He was a human being. At the very least, why didn’t someone stay with Sharp and hold his hand while he died?”
Thank God for people like Sir Edmund, who at the age of 86, clearly hasn’t lost his moral compass.
And the recent murder of Juan Zhang outside her Melbourne workplace has to confront us with the disturbing reality. How much motivation do we need to help someone in trouble? Surely a fundamental instinct in human nature was violated.
And yet, at the same time, we are now constantly asked to provide information about suspicious events, to report “suspicious looking” people who just might be terrorists.
There are numbers to call if your neighbour is wasting water, there is a government Web site devoted to informing Centrelink about welfare fraud – dob in a dole cheat.
There is a Vatican directive asking people to dob in a priest who just might be violating some liturgical rule.
Yes, we have civic and Church responsibilities – they are the other side of our privileges.
And maybe I am reading too much into the cases of David Sharp and Juan Zhang, but their deaths might well have been prevented if a little compassion had been offered.
Yet it is disturbing that in a free and democratic society, we are constantly now encouraged to reveal information about each other.
Surely it is far more important to look out each day for positive means to help people.
Failure to do so is an indication that we have lost our grip on our moral compass.
FR PASCHAL KEARNEY
Bremer Bay, WA
