Dismal Disaffection

It is difficult to understand how people can be so removed from one another.  Even among strangers there must be a bond as between human beings one feels charitably about.  If we see another person in difficulty, isn't it basic human nature to try to offer comfort?  If we are in the direct vicinity of someone whom danger is approaching are we not obligated by decency and our common human heritage to warn them, to guide them, to offer assistance if and as needed?

Can we do less to affirm our own humanity?

And what can it possibly be that afflicts some of us so that we are oblivious to basic decency?  That we observe, unaffected by the travails of others.  Could it be the effect of pervasive and ever-surrounding news sources that expose us continually to photographs of people being threatened and assailed by civil war, by natural disasters, by untoward accidents, by unavoidable and intractable war situations affecting civilians?

By photographs in the news media of wounded, wailing infants, of melancholy displaced refugees, of grief-stricken parents looking in vain for their children from whom they have become separated in the throes of some dreadful incident out of their control.  Have we allowed ourselves to become so hardened to the welfare of others that we cannot see it in ourselves to become involved, to make an effort when we are in proximity to those requiring help?

On the evidence provided by an incident in New York at the Times Square subway station, when a 58-year-old man waiting for his train, was shoved by a 30-year-old man - described as homeless and most certainly mentally deranged - into the path of an incoming train, and no one standing nearby makng an effort to help, we must, as a society have lost the valuable trait of caring. 

That people, as bystanders close enough to hear the 30-year-old attacker mumbling to himself, witnessing a minor altercation between him and the older man culminating in Ki-Suck Han's being pushed off the platform with a train scheduled for arrival, not having the inclination to move swiftly to help Mr. Han extract himself from the maw of death, is inconceivable. 

But it is the truth of the matter, nonetheless.

A free-lance photographer happened to be on the scene, and he took photographs of the dreadful situation.  It was such a photograph that was published in The New York Times on its Tuesday front page.  Of a man whom circumstances had fated to die in a matter of mere seconds from when the photograph was taken. 

Photographer R. Umar Abbasi was himself waiting to catch a train. When fortune presented to him the opportunity to immortalize a dread disaster in the making.  And he chose to do just that, instead of moving forward swiftly with the intention of offering whatever assistance he could to the man desperate to save his life in an instant of time. 

The photographer has defended himself, claiming that others were standing much closer and made no motion to help the endangered man clinging to the ledge of the platform.

"It took me a second to figure out what was happening ... I saw the lights in the distance.  My mind was to alert the train.  The people who were standing close to him ... they could have moved and grabbed him and pulled him up.  No one made an effort", explained Mr. Abbasi. 

No one else other than the quick-thinking Mr. Abbasi had the glory of seeing their independent photograph front and centre under the masthead of The New York Times.