Rain stopped play

What a miserable week (weatherwise) last week was.

It rained, and rained, and rained, and then it rained some more. My plan had been to complete the basement porch. Someone must have heard about my plan, and smiled. Then that someone let it rain for forty days and forty nights... No, that was someone else, wasn't it? It just felt like forty days and nights.

What I did manage to do was catch up with other workloads.

I've changed several light fittings, renewed sockets, switches, and a cooker hood, replaced washers on literally dozens of taps, rehung a couple of doors, restored two of my customers computers to fully functioning former glory, replaced a hand rail, built some flatpack, custom built a kitchen cabinet to hide a boiler, hung some curtains, and wired up a door bell. The one thing I didn't do last week was stop and offer a lift to a young teenage girl standing at a lonely bus stop in the pouring rain.

Why not?

Prejudice and cowardice!

I'm a 55 year old man driving a builder's van.

She was about 11 - 16 (who can tell?) and drowning at the bus stop.

Driving along the road, I was approaching the bus stop and saw her standing there, trying to hide behind the bus stop pole for protection against the rain.

I started to slow down, intending to offer a her a lift.

The windscreen wipers were having difficulty keeping up with the rain.

In the same second as I started to slow down, I made the decision to continue on without stopping. I don't think she even noticed me or the van.

Twenty years ago I would have stopped.

Ten years ago I would have stopped.

Five years ago I would have stopped.

But last week I didn't.

As I prepared to slow down, my thoughts were purely selfish.
She'll think I'm some sort of pervert.

She'll be afraid.

She could accuse me of something afterwards and I will have no defence.

and many other scenarios filled me with disquiet.

I have found the whole thing strangely sad.

She will never know that it made me feel wretched.

What has happened that we have developed into a society where I, and people like me, don't do what comes naturally (to offer help), because we are afraid of what might never happen.
Am I getting older and wiser, or simply older and more afraid?