Compassion students should have for each other is nonexistent.

“Call 911!” This plea for help made Nurse James Ward hurry from the safety of his home on Tuesday night after hearing gunshots outside. Ward got dressed and immediately preceded down the street to a crowd surrounding the body of Lenoris Rains. Rains had fallen victim to a surprise shooting in their Hillsborough community while playing cards outside with a friend. While spectators stood speechless around Rains’ body positioned facedown near a gutter, Ward instinctively turned Rains over and sat him up in an attempt to clear his passageway. While Ward remained a complete stranger to Rains, he still attempted to revive the homicide victim, despite warnings from surrounding bystanders not to touch him. While this surprising story of kindness to one’s neighbor ends in tragedy, as Lenoris Rains did not survive the fatal gunshot wounds, there is a lesson that FAMU can stand to learn from James Ward’s actions: accountability and compassion for one’s peers.Too often on FAMU’s campus will we see instances where compassion seems to be a word foreign in the Rattler’s vocabulary, whether it is simply the boy in the cafeteria who is struggling to carry his books and his plates to his seat, or a classmate who seems to continuously fail the tests that you ace with ease. Too often we as students turn a cold shoulder to our fellow peers’ plight, not acknowledging the fact that we are all running the same race and jumping the same hurdles. In a society where obstacles remain abound for young minorities, each attempting to be a success in their own right, it is not only thoughtful but necessary that we take the path less traveled that James Ward took on Tuesday night, and go out of our way to be a good Samaritan to our peers.