Stop Leaning In. Put Down Your IPhone. And HELP ME.

I was in a slightly similar situation the other day. I'm a male (white), walking to boxing class when about 0.75 blocks away, I see some kid getting attacked by... wait for it... 4 other kids. All women. All African-American.

There was a group of about 12-15 high school age girls and 10 of them were just watching 3 or 4 of them gang up on 1 of them.

WTF do I do here? I had the same thought process as many people in this thread. I could get involved, but realistically, there's absolutely no way I'm going to go try to break up a fight with that many people in it, let alone teenage girls.

I watched for about 5 seconds before I started to get my phone out to call the cops (which I also felt bad about b/c... wtf are they going to do... something needs to happen now).

Luckily for the kid, she managed to get away and they stopped pursuing her. But man, the feeling of helplessness sucked pretty hard.

That sounds not very far removed from: "She burned the dinner after I told her I was hungry.

I mean, this is an aspect of human nature that's been pretty well documented for decades, at least. It might make you uncomfortable, but it's also not some unusual, hard-to-believe example of how "the dark corners of US society are alien".

When I was 12 years old, a larger, older boy was drowning in the Chesapeake Bay. It was the kind of beach where the water is knee deep for 100 years out from shore, but then suddenly drops off to 11 feet or so of water.

He was bouncing off the bottom to get air (he couldn't swim) but his face was turning blue, and he was making choking noises and frantically splashing. I tried to grab him, and pull him to the sandbar. He clawed onto me and began drowning me. I punched and pried and kicked underwater to get him off of me, and thanked God when I got him off and got ten feet away and got air again. I yelled for help. The people on the beach 100 yards away did nothing. Perhaps it was disbelief... I ran through the knee deep water as fast as I could to them and yelled for help as I got there. Nobody moved. I wasn't thinking, just moving, and there were those styrofoam noodles on the ground next to their blanket. I snatched one without saying a word and ran back to the water faster than I ever have before.

By the time I got to him it was ugly. He was still bouncing up from the bottom, but he was barely conscious, and his face looked like something from a horror movie. I've seen some horrific shit, but a drowning person at that stage looks like a zombie. He grabbed the noodle, and I pulled him the 15 feet or so to the sandbar. 15 feet, and it was knee deep water. He couldn't walk, and I picked him up fireman's style, and he was coughing out and puking water all down my back as I carried him to shore. This was the 90s, so there were no cell phones in the rural county I lived in. I ran into a house near the beach and had the ambulance come. He almost died later of a lung infection, but he's ok now.

I asked my dad that night why nobody helped. My dad told me that I was a "helper" like him. (he was a volunteer EMT his whole life, and a volunteer fireman. Plus I watched him help strangers all the time growing up.) "Most people aren't helpers." he said.

As I've gotten older, I figured out that is the case. And when you a helper, you have to help a lot. I don't know what it is, but basically maybe 80 to 90% of people don't do shit in these situations. They subconsciously don't even notice. And being a helper sucks, a lot, sometimes, but you still do it because you don't think you just do and your gut won't let you. You can't walk away because of some deep down feeling that you are subhuman if you do.

My worst helper experience was stopping a guy in a rural NC bar's parking lot from beating his girlfriend. I started fighting him, and his GF (who he had just been beating) smashed a bottle on my head. My vision went blurry, and she jumped on my back and I fell to the ground. They both then proceeded to beat the shit out of me on the gravel parking lot ground.

Now, I avoid going into the "hipster" neighborhoods of DC. As my wife pointed out, nobody in these neighborhoods is a helper. Helpers can't live in these neighborhoods long, because inevitably you end up getting sucked into this shit and you are always alone.

Did I oversimplify? Maybe. But that's my experience. I can't help but help people in trouble, and in urban and suburban areas, its probably a bad evolutionary strategy. In the country, not so much. People care there, and they reciprocate. This is probably due to such small social groups....... Wow, I ranted for a while.

I'm so sorry for this woman...... I wish I'd have been there.

"The guy" was a coward. I was raised in the rural south. Most parts of our culture suck: bigoted, violent, small-minded, overly-judgemental, overly-religous, you name it.

But you know what doesn't suck? The honor culture. (to be fair, its the root of a LOT of bad things too) You are taught from birth that if you don't protect those weaker than yourself (provided they aren't gay or non-white, since of course this IS the south.... sigh) you are not a worthy human being.

Not helping a person you know who is in dire need is the lowest of the lowest of the low. You learn this as a kid. If you see my previous comment, I'm not armchair quarterbacking here, I've actually helped people, and had some very bad things and good things happen as a result.

Of course, someone else on here pointed out how much less violent society has become, and how we no longer know how to react to it. I think this is true, which explains my whole theory on southerners, since the southern U.S. has much, much higher rates of violence amongst both blacks and whites than the other parts of the country.