The night before we got home, our daughter Sharon's cat Cindy ran out into the road. There was no squeal of brakes, no apology – the driver may never have known he ran over a cat.
        Sharon saw a familiar bundle of black-and-white fur lying in the road.
        “You silly cat,” she said. “Why are you lying there? Don't you know you could be hit by a car?”
        Then she saw the blood trickling from Cindy's nose and ears.
        And her priorities changed.
        We had left our car with her, while we were away. She grabbed it to rush Cindy to the emergency clinic at Edmonton's animal hospital.
        “I don't know if I was caught on radar,” Sharon told us when we got back. “But if I was, you're going to get a hefty ticket in the mail. I wasn't paying much attention to speed limits.”

Similar tales
        By coincidence, the taxi driver who took us to London's Heathrow airport that same morning told us a similar story. A customer had slipped in the bathtub, fallen, and split her head open. By the time he got there, the towel she had wrapped around her head was already soaked through with blood.
        “It takes about two weeks for them to process speeding tickets and send them out,” he told us. “So I still don't know how many demerit points I'm going to get for that trip.”
        In England, you're allowed 12 demerit points a year. Then you lose your licence. Depending on how many cameras he passed on his way to the Chelmsford hospital, that one trip could lose him his annual income.
        Of course he had a good excuse. But police cameras don't care about excuses. Their job is simply to record every car traveling at more than a specified speed.

Prioritizing values
        Emergencies that like tend to throw our scales of values into sharp perspective. Most people, I find, think of themselves as law abiding, even if they do occasionally push the speed limit. They would rarely ignore a stop sign, never run a red light…
        But when a life is at stake – even a cat's – those principles go out the window.
        If someone died or were left permanently disabled because I took the time to obey every jot and tittle of the highway regulations on my way to the hospital, I would feel guilty for the rest of my life.
        Of course, if racing to a hospital caused injury or death to someone else, I would feel equally guilty. But I probably wouldn't think of that at the time, because it hasn't happened yet, and might not happen at all. The immediate emergency would demand my total attention.
        I need to remember to consider extenuating circumstances, whenever I find it too easy to condemn someone for stealing bread from a grocery store, or dipping into a company's petty cash. Of course they did wrong. But in a crisis, an emergency, a disaster, some wrongs are less wrong than others.