Received an SMS for help earlier. It was in Chinese. Help for this person with cancer , for people to donate blood and forward the message to as many people as possible. I just stopped what I was doing, and eye-balled my phone, eye-balled that message. I couldn't help but wonder, is this message for real? After all, it could just be a phoney. We all get messages for help every now and then, be it by e-mail or text message. Its all very simple, step forward and offer help if you can, but if you can't, its alright. Just forward the message to as many people as possible. In the beginning, its no problem at all. You think to yourself, why not? But as time passes, you get more and more of such requests, and you begin to tire. You start to pick and choose what messages you wish to forward, and this number progressively drops to zero. But its still fine. You still bother to read the messages. But one day, you receive a familiar message. Its one you helped forward a long time ago. You hit your limit. You convince yourself that the messages must be fakes, and from then on, never open another one of those messages. I'm one of those people. Sick and tired of it all. But as I stared at that message, the shame hit me. It doesn't matter whether its real or not; what matters is the sincerity in a person's heart. What stops people from forwarding those messages? Is it truly because they believe that the message is fake, or is it simply the fear that people will laugh at them for wasting their time on something that must be fake? Sure, there will be fakes out there, but do we then treat every single message for help as fake? I think its down to the world we live in. Long gone are the days when a man's word could take him places; nowadays its all in black and white. We have grown apart, detached from one another. We have no time for each other, only enough time for work or study. We have built walls around ourselves, growing cold and indifferent, and it has hardened our hearts. Fooled once, and we prefer to shut ourselves off, sometimes for good. Trust is something we find hard to rebuild. Could I trust this one message? I guess I can. Well, I did. I forwarded the message. To a number of people. After all, I'm still working on my sincerity. I wanna break down these walls.
i heard the crickets at 11:53 pm
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