Minding Our Own Business

September 19, 1998

I am nosy. I have always been told that and as I get older and realize more and more who I am, I’d have to agree. I like to know what’s going on around me and I’m always interested in what other people are doing. When I was little, I would hear the monotonous refrain, “Aaron, mind your own business.” This statement usually came right as I got to the juiciest part of a story. Now I get paid for this, go figure!
As funny as it may seem, I wish more people wouldn’t just mind their own business. Last month I read two columns that helped sway me to this new way of thinking and impress upon me the importance of taking an interest in what goes on with our fellow man.
As the story goes, a 19-year-old UC Berkeley sophomore named David Cash Jr., who is a Los Angeles resident, merely watched as a friend Jeremy Strohmeyer, attacked a 7-year-old girl in the restroom of a casino near Las Vegas, police say. He did not try to stop or even report his friend’s actions.
The little girl, Sherrice Iverson, was then sexually molested and strangled to death, authorities say. For this crime, which happened in May 1997, Strohmeyher was charged with murder, kidnapping and sexual assault. Cash was charged with nothing.
What’s worse than the fact that Cash got of “Scott free” were his callous comments he made to the Los Angeles Times and while on a radio talk show. “I’m not going to get upset over someone else’s life,” he told the Times. “I just worry about myself first.”
To me this sounds similar to the comments made by Cain after he killed his brother Abel, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” I would like to think that deep down, humanity has the strength to be their brother’s keeper. Referring to Sherrice’s death, Cash said he was, “not going to lose sleep over somebody else’s problems.” On the contrary, he said, this incident had helped him get more dates.
My father gave me some wonderful advice when I was a child: “Aaron, never hit anyone first, no matter what they say to you. But if they hit you, defend yourself. If you ever see someone hit your sister or another girl, get ‘em.” Maybe Cash didn’t receive the same teaching from his father. If he had followed similar advice, he would surely have been the hero in this story and not the coward.
This whole Cash incident made me start to doubt something I’ve always felt to be true – that deep down, there is good in everybody. I’d always believed that people were inherently good. These concerns continued to trouble me and I thought about them while in a check-out line at Raley’s. It was there that I found an example of someone who did get involved with someone else’s business.
“Nyob zoo,” said the checker to a small Hmong woman in front of me. Never being one to mind my own business, my ears perked up. She smiled and said, “Koj puaf nyob zoo?”
I looked up to see that the checker’s name was Warren. As the Hmong woman left he called out, “Ntsib koj sai!” After speaking to Warren for a couple of minutes I learned that he can say “hello,” “thank you,” “till I see you again” and can count to 30. Warren, 59, from Paradise, is not merely in the grocery business, but the people business as well.
Warren can say some words in several languages and is working on Hmong. With the infrequent lessons from his customers, it takes him about six months to learn one word. Why all this effort? “Just the fact that you can speak a word or two helps you break down the fence of whether to like someone or not,” he said. He wants his customers to feel comfortable with him, no matter what their cultural background. “After all, what you cast is what you sow,” he said.
I left the store feeling much better. Maybe Cash will never sow what he cast, but with each new word Warren learns in his new tongue, my faith in humanity is strengthened.