A woman in Wichita, Kan., died after getting knifed at a convenience store. The crazy part is that five people reportedly went about their business while she lay there dying; one person even took a picture of her with her cell phone.
Video shows shoppers stepping over dying woman
This article appears in Jul 5-11, 2007.
Sax,
I know that sounds unfathomable but there’s a name for that phenomenon and it’s called the bystander effect. You can read all about it. The term came about after the murder of Kitty Genovese where 38 people heard her screams for help and not one person did.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitty_Genovese
So Red Star is reading this and thinking there could be some variation on Stockholm Syndrome operating here. Or maybe Stockholm with an overlay of bystander. Or the other way around. Thing is, we never heard Paula Abdul’s chihuaha’s side of the story.
I think political correctness contributes to this phenomenon. People are afraid of being “wrong” or “stupid” and so become numb to realities around them. Uninvolvement is cool and self protective.
But how sad. There was a time in America where that would not have happened. In England people are trained to help with a structured program.
Maybe we need such a program in the United States. We might e able to learn the compassion we have lost.
WTF? How is “political correctness” the cause of people not helping a wounded stranger? Helping somebody would be the politically correct thing to do.
The term “political correctness” was cooked up in the late 1980s, when extremist liberals were going overboard with terms like “womyn” and saying that “all sex is rape.” Such goofiness was limited to a militant minority, but people on the right used the rhetorical brush of “political correctness” to paint ANYBODY who held a leftist position, even a completely sensible one. The pendulum has swung all the way back to the right since then, and the use of “political correctness” as a root evil no longer holds much water — convenient though it is for scapegoating purposes.
Veritas, I would be all for a structured program in which people were trained to help others via basic CPR techniques and the like. From the story, it sounds like this was a poor community, where people probably made a habit of non-involvement out of self-preservation.