There was nothing special about today. I had a morning appointment for coffee with a potential business partner and we agreed to meet at a café on a main throughfare here in Westchester. As it was a beautiful day, we chose to sit outdoors, in an arched alcove right outside, which partially obscured our view of the adjacent street.
Suddenly, I heard a loud noise like a car hitting something followed by someone yelling. I got up, turned around and saw a man lying in the street. I told my companion to call 911. Unconsciously, seeing that he was amid major oncoming traffic, I walked in the middle of the street to make myself visible to drivers so they would slow down. I didn’t want him to get any more injured than he clearly was.
When I approached him and began to yell to see if he could communicate, he was unresponsive, though I noticed he was breathing. I looked up and fortunately, the first car in traffic was an unmarked County Police office, who radioed the incident in. He approached the victim at which point I went back to my companion as I didn’t want to get in the way of the Emergency Responders who appeared rather quickly. They attended to the gentleman, and he was placed in the ambulance and transported to the local Trauma Center.
As I walked back to the café, I couldn’t help but notice how many people had their phones out, snapping pictures of the car with the smashed windshield and the pile left by the EMTs of bloody towels and the man’s shirt that they had sliced open while treating him.
Hours later, I sent a message to one of my best friends who is a veteran police officer in Westchester asking after the man’s condition because a rumor had been posted on Facebook that the man had died. My friend said that the victim was alive but out of respect for his privacy I will only say that his injuries are severe, and he will have a long and difficult road forward as far as we know right now. He also told me that he was told about what I did.
Here’s our conversation:
“It takes some bravery to do that. You should be proud of doing that…You will be thinking about what you saw for a while.”
“I’m lucky. I didn’t see it. All I did was hear it. I only did what my conscience told me to do.”
“You wanted to help. I bet there were ten people that took out their phones to record someone else’s worst moment.”
“There were. It made me sick after the fact.”
“I ask people why they want to record someone else’s worst moment. Is that something you want to relive? Something you really want to share with the world?’
“We are swirling the drain as a society.”
“Yes we are.”
In the truest sense of the word, this was an accident. Nothing lurid. Just an accident.
I am no hero. As I said in the conversation, I only acted in the way my moral compass compelled me to act. But that begs the question—why was I the only one? What is the compulsion to immediately record these things? Maybe I’m exaggerating when I say we’re swirling the drain as a society but then again, maybe I’m not?
I try to stay objective about everything I experience in life but simply I don’t understand what good comes from filming that. This speaks to a larger problem in society—we are so enmeshed in our own little cocoons that we simply don’t have the capacity to show the simplest amount of empathy any longer. We just don’t care. We’re too wound up in our own worlds, in our own politics, in our own minds to consider the concept of reversibility.
What if that was you? Would you have wanted to be videoed and photographed while bleeding in the street?
