Feral, murderous “teenagers”. Some people deserve to have both legs badly broken, just as a lesson.
For the first time in years, I gave a ride to a guy I saw walking about a mile from my house. Wasn’t hitchhiking, just shuffling up the road down by the river with a jacket in hand. Warm day. This was in an area by the James River in Richmond. Very expensive river-front property. I stopped and yelled back to see if he needed a ride. He started trotting up and I told him to slow down. He asked if he should ride in the bed of the pickup truck, but I told him to sit up front.
I took him a two miles up a very long hill so he could catch a ride with his wife. He was doing some day labor down there. Older black fellow, I could hardly understand him, but we had a nice conversation anyway. Almost stopped at my house to give him a beer but thought better of it. Reminded me of better days where you could safely help people out.
Back in the ‘60s, I had an uncle who was an enormous typically gregarious Irishman and WWII Navy veteran who drove a circuit as a traveling salesman from OK City to Brownsville, to NOLA. I spent two weeks with him one summer. He used to pick up bums and hitchhikers, and especially servicemen and have long conversations with them. For my benefit, he would always get them to tell their life’s story, until I began to see an obvious pattern. Sometimes, he would switch places with them and let them drive while he took a nap. When he dropped them off he would often pass them a ten spot. I’ll never forget those long drives on the flat Texas highways. Some of those he picked up could have been in Avedon’s drifter series. It’s a different world now, with no place for people like my uncle or those types of drifters.
We usually have a couple whopper snow storms each year where I live. I'll stop if I see people stranded at their cars, trudging along a blocked road, or something similar. You can help a crisis, but you can't help bad habits.