It is the oldest, simplest, and I guess the most challenging thing in the human experience. Me want thing. Not enough for all. Me take. You suffer. Through the eons and across each of our lives, we are presented with myriad moral opportunities to do something with relative risk for ourselves and relative huge gains for another. But so often we don’t help.
I studied this for years with client Aware Awake Alive and then California Polytechnic University in what became WITH US: The National Center for Peer Accountability. It’s an area of particular focus on college campuses called “bystander intervention” and it essentially means, if you see someone in trouble… help. The idea is train students on how to see a need and then what to do about it.
Seems simple enough to me. In life, we’re presented with glimpses of one another’s suffering and have a chance to help. For most people, if they live long enough, they realize that not much else matters and that we’re all connected. Hoarding stuff, prioritizing our own tribe, and selfish behavior hold us all back. But amidst the day to day, people struggle with the concept. So when we see that person in trouble, we rationalize:
- Relationship abuse or sexual assault? Maybe that’s not what’s going on. I shouldn’t get involved.
- Dangerously drunk, high, or addicted? Not my problem and what can I do?
- Bullying? Isn’t that how we learn how to overcome adversity?
- Sick? How can I know for sure and isn’t that an invasion of privacy?
- Homeless or headed there? Is my money really going to matter?
The simplest example is if you are walking by a pool and you see someone drowning, you jump in or throw a life preserver. That requires little of you and means the difference between life and death to them. Almost nobody would keep walking, even though getting involved could be messy with EMS and maybe legal concerns or some new relationship that’s implied.
You would do the simple, quick thing to save a life.
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Why, then, when presented with a global deadly pandemic that’s taken nearly 300,000 lives globally and just over 83,000 in the U.S. alone—so far—and we know that simply staying home, washing our hands, and wearing a simple cloth mask on our faces when we need to go out will save lives and prevent sickness and economic devastation to households/communities… so many of us shrug and say “but I want to be free to do it the old way”.
Right now, countless times on your block and in your family and all over your city, people are choosing comfort and personal whimsy over protecting the very lives of their neighbors? Only the most fringe crackpots think the death statistics aren’t real. Everybody else can see the way things have been headed so quickly. And yet so many choose what’s easy and familiar over what’s sensibly humane. Why?
Are we so selfish and short sighted that we can’t just sit on our ass at home or slip on a mask as we do as we otherwise please? If for no other reason than to not risk our own health or that of a loved one or the things in our town we want to still be around after this mess… it seems like even to the most self-centered dolt that we’d just do the simple thing that only slightly inconveniences us just to save lives.
But so many refuse. And they will continue to refuse until the bodies literally pile up and our ability to call ourselves moral and decent people will also be on that pile. All because we couldn’t be bothered to consider one another.
And it was so easy.
