Karma works both ways
Do the right thing and watch it spread. Kindness and generosity are contagious, Liberty Mutual would have you believe. A man picks up a child’s doll that fell on the sidewalk; the child’s mother passes the karma forward by moving someone’s coffee cup from the edge of a table; a bystander sees this and later helps a fallen pedestrian to his feet. City living — and the need for this concept — at its finest.
Not a rural scene to be found in this campaign, set in areas of the country where people do this anyway — they don’t need to witness an act to remember to help others. In the urban jungle, you need a push.
If someone witnesses you not letting the pizza delivery guy walk into the street and get his head spattered, maybe they help a mom lift a baby carriage from the bus. A person would see that and help a co-worker with an object on a high shelf; keep a kid’s ball from rolling into the street; help an old man with his luggage. This stuff snowballs.
Holding a door open for a total stranger might never happen unless somebody gave up their seat on the bus. Why else would you push someone out of the way if you saw a stack of boxes were about to fall on them? It’s quite likely because you noticed a fellow human being practice simple traffic etiquette he might otherwise have disregarded. And if you don’t see any of this, a kid loses their toy and the pizza delivery guy dies.
Who kills him?
A bus driver thinking about robbing a bank but decides not to so the bank manager lives, leaving him able to father a son who’ll grow up to become the greatest serial killer in the history of mankind. He kills 485 women and children before it’s learned that, since 1991, his sperm has been donated to fertility clinics all over the country and many of those birth records have been lost or destroyed. The bus driver changes his mind about the robbery, deciding instead to work his shift after someone holds the elevator for him.
Along his route, he notices a child’s toy on the ground and this momentary distraction causes him to miss a traffic light, thus delaying his arrival at the intersection with the distracted pizza delivery guy.
Nobody dies.
The pizza guy was an undercover FBI agent who’d been working for Venezuelan interests over the past 16 months, infiltrating as a means to disrupt a large-scale plan to contaminate portions of the U.S. food supply. He was to meet an operative and, by any means necessary, extract information vital to national security before he could get it into the hands of the Venezuelans — but no — you, city person, noticed a random Good Samaritan feeding a parking meter for a stranger, had to get involved and throw your arm out. Now he got away.
That operative was supposed to be stopped.
That drop was never supposed to happen.
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