How indifferent are we?

 Today is just an ordinary day, or not had it not been for the heavy downpour yesterday that again caught my attention. It is quite a familiar sight indeed: a dead rat lying on the road after a night rain. What do you do? I don't know, but I would avoid it, thinking how filthy this creature can be. And yet again, in the afternoon, the rat was on and the only vestige left was the brown color of its blood, stained on the road. It had been either cleaned by the janitor or crashed dozens of times by several indifferent cars and motorbikes, each sticking some parts of the rat's body. I have seen this scene so many times that until today, it conjured up an image in my head: our society. 

The one who first compared the destitute as rats must have been excellent at analogy. Rats live in dirty, worst of all areas, down in sewers. They have an unbearable odor and an unbearable appearance. From the perspective of some affluent figures, the poor look exactly the same. They live in houses that are deemed unfit for human habitation, consume unhealthy products, not fast foods but food from garbage, and they certainly have an detestable smell. The similarities do not stop here. 

The great resemblance is our attitude towards both. Rats die on the road, and the thing I perceive is how filthy they smell. No one on the road ever dares to pick it up and put it on the sideway. The only thought in their mind is how to avoid this rat, which augurs a bad day, and if they had just stepped on it. I have seen a car passing by, crashing the rat as if it were a bump, and there lies it, flat like a paper. I'm not implying about how humans from different social classes are killing each other, but how indifferent we are. Look in the poor's society where many of the rich rarely set their feet on, we can see how miserable they are. Helping such abhorrent and dirty humans does not bring them any benefits. And perhaps, there is another point here, should it be too malicious a suggestion, please give me some comments, is how useless both can appear. The poor do nothing for world peace whilst rats do nothing for human development. The destitute are just like another bump, and it is not obtrusive enough for some to consider helping them. 

I read a short story by the renowned Vietnamese author Nam Cao titled "Điếu văn" wherein the value of an impoverished, of labor working class, is of less importance than that of a buffalo. When the latter dies, owners have to replace it immediately, which is the last resort while as usual, it must be taken care of with regular feeding more than that of a worker. But when a laborer dies, they can find another immediately, it is no big deal since there are hundreds of them out there fighting for work. After all, humans are more replaceable than animals. 

I'm not implying rats are innocent or good. They actually cause fatal diseases and harm crops. But they serves as the embodiment of how the society treats those of the lowest class, which can be seen in feudal eras. The poor can be either goodwill or not, but they do not define our way of treating them all. Upon realizing this problem, I may still be reluctant at the notion of saving, or at least kindly helping it avoid be crashed after death. But is it that this problem will forever remain unsolved, or someone will struck the world to change? Just like the boy on the Internet who uses his bare hands to remove debris from the sewer, I do hope someone will save the rats.