Dying in the cold

This story seemed beyond melancholy to me and of course it asks questions that we may not comfortably answer.

Could we walk past a man dying in the street or would we stop? Have we already walked by a person in extreme need?

More importantly, I feel, it illuminates how our world is. People entirely lacking community can die like this because there is no one to see them and say, oh it's Rene, he cannot be okay like that. Without community, you are just an individual whom people see and say, Oh, I don't want to disturb him since he's chosen to lie in the street like that. If I wake him, he might be angry or aggressive.

We almost expect each other to be aggressive. We see strangers as potentially harmful, where perhaps we might once have seen them as somewhat benign. It's almost as though we live in a world that has birthed in us a deep suspicion of each other.

It is almost as though we have learned not to want anything from any other person, to be islands impervious to each other. And if anyone does reach out to us, we fear that it will not be to give us anything but to take. Is it that that is our experience of each other? Not really, but we act as though it is. We can't either be the first to reach out because we have learned just as much to fear that we will be taken advantage of. 

We never ask whether that would actually matter.

*

It's another question why there is the focus on the fact this guy took photos of flamenco artists and somehow this makes for a greater tragedy. Is it okay then that 600 homeless people die each year in France? If he'd just been nobody, would that be fine?

But you can't just shake every rough sleeper awake to check that they are awake. But was this what was at stake here? Wasn't Rene in the middle of the pavement? Didn't people just step around him? Who sleeps like that? A drunk, one supposes.

But should you just let someone who's passed out on the pavement lie there in the cold?

Of course not. Let us not pretend that people did not know they ought to stop. It's the whole Kitty Genovese affair. Although it turns out that some of the bystanders who saw or overheard Kitty's murder did contact the police. It is thought to be an instance of the "bystander effect" though. 

The bystander effect is an outcome of there being lots of people around. The individual simply assumes someone else will do something about the problem. This was noted by Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: he called this someone else's problem.

So far from feeling Rene was okay, the people who walked past him may simply have thought he was someone else's problem, nothing to do with them. And if we're honest, we can feel sympathy for them because this has happened to us too. We've walked past things that we should have done something about. We've failed to protest things that happened to other people. 

The right thing to do is to stop and ask the man on the pavement whether he is okay. If he's a rough sleeper, he needs to be out of the weather anyway. If he's just drunk, he'll tell you to fuck off and you'll be unharmed. But... well, it's easy to know and we probably do all know what is the right thing to do. However, the right thing can be incredibly hard to accomplish. It takes real courage -- courage that will mostly be unheralded -- to do it. It can have adverse consequences.

But it's the right thing not to let someone die in the cold.

posted by Dr Zen @ 4:31 pm