A few years back I was at the central train station in Malmö in the south of Sweden, waiting for a train to take me back to Stockholm. I was younger then, more naive, and perhaps Sweden was too.
Sweden had never suffered a terrorist attack except for the one that backlashed on the terrorist himself, his pipe-bomb killing him as he didn’t even manage to get out of his car to plant it. At the time I thought, like presumably so many other swedes, that even terrorist attacks are ’lagom’. For you that don’t know that word, it translates to something like Just about right, or Just enough. There is no real translation in English.
But back then, in Malmö, such things as terror was far from my mind. Indeed, it was a beautiful spring day with lots of sunshine, the business of the train station softly rattling away in the background. A double espresso was sitting on the tabletop at the café, and a newspaper in my hands, so when a gentleman asked me to watch his bag – a training trunk kind of bag – while he went to get his tickets, I didn’t think twice.
Not for a while, anyway. But as the minutes crept by, I did have second thoughts about the matter. Should I open the bag to look inside? Should I call security? The police? Should I leave, leaving the other guests at the café to their destiny? Didn’t the man look Arabic? Muslim even? (No, he didn’t, but my mind insisted he did).
Those five or ten minutes felt like an eternity. Once you get something on your mind, it kind of just grows on you. It doesn’t matter that reason (and statistics) tell you that the risk of that bag holding a bomb set to go off at a train station in Malmö is far less than say you having a severe car accident or even less likely an aeroplane accident.
Nevertheless, today it would be out of the question to do something chivalry like that; to accept responsibility for a stranger’s bag while he’s away getting tickets. Or stopping for a stranded fellow motorist. Or attend to a fellow commuter who’s taken ill on the morning subway train.
For safety reasons, I have to decline.
Should we discard all that is human? Or that we like to believe is (or make) human? Like solidarity, helping a fellow human in need? Or should we fail to assist a fellow traveller, so he has to carry his heavy bags to the ticket office?
Or is there a better way?
Perhaps, at Malmö train station, my response should have been a little bit more safety aware, but not quite as much as the title of this article implies.
Perhaps my answer should have been along the lines of
Absolutely sir, but for safety reasons, would you mind opening your bag so I know there’s nothing harmful inside?
