Morality

when one travels the busses one is not merely aboard a conveyance, cocooned from the issues and moral mire that make up modern life, as might be expected. Rather many of the questions that can be dismissed or at least put to one side in the day to day world are thrust to the forefront maybe even amplified by the magnificent steel carriage as it hurtles (stopping every so often at designated destinations) through the inhospitable night.

Today one other moral quandary caught my peripheral vision and proceeded to elbowed it's way to the front of my consciousness.

I was sitting in the middle of the bus had a seat to myself, and a good vista of the rest of the bus and passengers. My mind was idly drifting from subject ( the implications of the governments incompetence with personal data (end to the id card debate?)) to unconnected subject (john terrys foot injury and it's impact of Chelsea's critical christmas fixture schedule).

When the bus pulled to a holt to allow a fellow passenger to alight, this passenger we in front of me so as anyone would, i looked at her, in order to gain a greater understanding of this character who had chosen to holt the bus here, thus making my journey only slightly, but still longer than it needs to be.

She was middle aged and had many bags of shopping (which she took an inordernat amount of time to gather and carry off the bus elongating my journey even further!) as she was about to get off the bus i noticed that she had left her news paper. As I'm sure you would gentle reader i motioned to get up and reunite paper with reader. Luckily before the motion could be completed i spied the words 'Daily Mail' on the mast head! and it was at that instant that i was plunged into my very own moral maze; On one hand the paper (notice how the word news has been dropped) belonged to this woman she had paid (one assumes) for it so it was her property, On the other it's the daily mail a hate filled rag of lies and bigotry. which is the kindest course of action? to allow her to consume the hate and fact twisting of the great satan? or stand by as a fellow human being is disunited with one of her newly acquired possessions?

It was late whatever shops were open would surely be sold out of there meager allocation of libel and scandal raped up in a convenient tabloid rapper for today. what if she had nearly done the sudoku? what if she had yesterdays crossword at home and had waited all day to discover if 3 across was really occultation even if it didn't fit with that nailed on cert of mangrove for 7 down?

What did i do? i did what was right.