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# Question and answer period
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/question-and-answer-period-editor/
- Published: 2008-05-10T15:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-24T19:34:23.000Z
- Author: Guest Author
- Tags: Opinion, Pacific Palisades, #archive-import

*By Tim Dillenbeck Santa Monica*

I walk through Palisades Park. There is a distraught Latina in a wheelchair, crying, weeping, hands clutching her face. How can I walk by and not at least try to console her? How could I?

Now I pass a motionless figure lying sprawled in an alley. How can I pass and not even stop to see if he’s breathing? How could I?

I stare into the sickly-yellow jaundiced eyes of a man slouched listlessly on a bench, stomach distended. How can I not help him to a hospital, knowing, that by doing nothing, he will be dead in a week? How could I?

How can I ignore these people, pretend they don’t exist, believe it’s not my problem? How could I?

I can’t. Because if I do, I will have forsaken my humanity.

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on May 10, 2008.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/051008.pdf?ref=smdp.com)