feel free to post this under "call me cynical" a-la mr. luse.
this week a 78-year-old man was hit by a car in hartford and left bleeding, but conscious and apparently immobile, in the middle of the street as car after car drove around his body and walkers-by gawked, but then just kept on walking. the city is "shocked" by the inhumanity of its citizens. one man saying, "like a dog they left him there." Bystanders Ignore Hit-and-Run Victim
well, i beg to differ, but i imagine if the man had been a dog, people would have stopped because (a) dogs and their families don't tend to sue "good samaritans" in this country, (b) we tend to be a contraception/abortion-minded country and have very little regard for human life in general, and (c) as a whole, we hold our elders in very low esteem, if not contempt, in this bountious land of ours. so the question shouldn't be why didn't anyone stop to help this man, but how can we think anyone would.
I think some of it can be chalked up to the tendency (I think I read this in The Tipping Point) of people to respond better when they think they are the only hope...such as in the case of kitty Genovese in the early '60's in New York. Not so much a case of crass indifference, but crass assumption that someone else will take care of it.
I felt better when my husband told me he doesn't mind finding out that he is the fifth person to call 911 about an incident. He'd rather err on the side of safety. Maybe if some of the 911 dispatchers wouldn't sound so put out if you're not the first report, people these days wouldn't mind risking redundancy.
But...I'm thinkin'...even if all those passers-by thought someone else might have called 911, why didn't they try to divert traffic or just stand by the victim?
great question, ms. ellyn.