Society as individual, or a common community spirit? All signs point to the former.

I read the news today, oh boy
About a lucky man who made the grade
And though the news was rather sad,
I just had to laugh.
I saw the photograph.
He blew his mind out in a car.
He didn't notice that the lights had changed .
A crowd of people stood and stared,
They'd seen his face before.
Nobody was really sure,
If he was from the House of Lords
- A Day in the Life by The Beatles

I did read the news today, and it made me sick. There was a news article about Juan Zhang, a lady of 35, who left her workplace last Friday. She was heard screaming in the nearby carpark by eight witnesses. An argument between a man and a woman promptly followed this blood curdling scream. Her body went missing, but police found blood, glasses, and other belongings where her car had been and feared she was dead. Her body was found in the boot of her car this morning.

Why am I disappointed? I'm disappointed that eight witnesses heard her screams, and not ONE SINGLE PERSON rang emergency. Perhaps because they didn't want the police to question them. Perhaps because they thought it was a domestic between a couple. Perhaps because they thought someone else MUST have heard her screams as well. It's a well researched fact that the greater chance of more people presence at a scene, the less socially responsible you feel to help. These are all legitimate scenarios, but at the end of the day, I'm so disappointed that someone has lost their life because nobody bothered to call the police. There are so many what-if scenarios you can run through with me, and they may all end up with the same outcome: she dies. But. Just that one what-if. What-if someone had called police. She may still be alive today - badly hurt, but alive nonetheless.

On the other end of the extreme, I had a chat with Sam today about police officers. Her husband is a police officer himself, and she had so many examples where people would call police saying that next door neighbours were having a domestic and they're about to kill each other. So Sam's husband would rock up, only to find that the neighbours were playing drums loudly. What the? Asked why they lied to the police, the caller used the excuse that if someone wasn't dying, the police would treat it low priority and so wouldn't show for another hour or so.

Yes - I'm quite disgusted. You have, on one extreme, witnesses to a murder who wouldn't call police, and, on the other extreme, people who waste the police's time by lying to the police. I'm disgusted with the people who lie to police in this fashion, and I'm so disappointed with the rest who don't call emergency when it sounds like an emergency.

The society we live in has become individualistic - it's all everyone for themselves. The sense of community as a whole has evaporated. When you're too scared to approach your neighbour to tell them to lessen their drumming, and need to resort to lie to the police to get their attention is alarming. What concerns me even more is that these people feel justified by their actions.

Then, this afternoon, I read a news article where a disabled athlete was climbing to the Mount Everest base camp, passed by a dying man, and left him for dead. Not only that, it wasn't just him, forty other people passed this dying man, and did not do a darn thing to help save him. Ok - so it's cold and harsh up there where survival is key, but it leaves me stunned that a group of forty people could pass the dying man (who was still alive at the time), and did not stop to try and help him at all, and went along their march upwards. The disabled athlete in hindsight did admit that they may have been able to help save his life, because there were so many of them. But instead, he left the man there to die. Another loss of life. And think of his family, how they would feel *sigh*

Everytime I hear these stories (be they strangers), I lose a little more of my faith in humanity. I honestly wonder what we've become, and I wonder what the future holds for us, when love and compassion leaves us for the cold hard, primal instinct of one for oneself, and nothing else. Call me idealistic, but I still believe that we can become better people. The question for me is, how long will I continue to think this way? How long I will honestly have faith in this notion of a better society when I read so many articles on our cruel, cruel behaviour towards others. And that saddens me.