Those of you who follow me on Twitter know that I was deeply upset by the injury and death of Xiao Yueyue, a two-year-old in Guangzhou, China. She was hit by a truck, which drove away, and lay in the street bleeding for seven minutes. Nineteen people walked by her without stopping for help until a street sweeper moved her out of the road and alerted her panicked mother.
I was stunned and horrified that anyone could walk right by a bleeding toddler lying in the road. A tiny child, in pain, alone and still in danger, and no one helps her. How does this happen? I understood the callousness that develops toward adults, but to a dying child? It leaves me speechless and teary.
My attempt to understand how this happens included reading about Chinese law, Chinese culture, and the bystander effect. There’s not much I can do about other people, but I can try to prevent myself from becoming the kind of person who walks past a bleeding toddler.
I finally made a Twitter plea for help on how to avoid becoming a bystander, and it led to a wise response from a friend of mine. She pointed out that we walk past other people’s pain every day as expats and as people living in a brutal world. There is more human suffering out there than acute bodily trauma and we make a daily decision to ignore it.
I am already the kind of person who can ignore a toddler in pain, as long as she’s not in my line of sight.
We’re all bystanders. The bystander effect is the story of our age, from climate change to famine in the Horn of Africa. We let terrible things happen because everyone else lets them happen too, and because we feel helpless to stop them. I don’t like it. I don’t know how to stop it. I don’t know what to do.
Alanna, you’re writing about what happened and how you feel. That’s I believe a step. Thank you for writing this. It made me more aware. Step by step.
Sincerely, Ben
I read the article, hoping to understand why the mother and all those other individuals did not help her child. I found no answer. Perhaps it was in the video I could not bear to watch. I do not understand how any human being can ignore a child in pain. But then I never do.
I respond to this understanding of being a bystander with similar feelings of never doing enough. I feel all too often a bystander, unwilling to see and take action or to take enough action.
The sheer weight of the pleas for help that come my way every day is staggering. I respond to as many as I can, in the best ways I can, but always I leave at least as many unwitnessed and unactioned, frequently more. Even when I take action, I know my small contributions are nearly useless, perhaps completely so.
We live in a time when we have the ability to witness not only the rape beneath our window, but speakable and unspeakable suffering of individuals all over the world. How can we possibly respond to each and every one of these incidents and traumas with the complete presence of our being and resources?
Someone once told me we have a duty not to become burned out, a duty to take care of ourselves first, that we might continue to speak (in that case) for those who have no voice. In the face of unspeakable horror, sometimes it helps to remember the blades of grass that grow between the cracks in concrete. They grow where they are because they can and because they have no other choice. I always see them as a little celebration of life and a reminder of the tenacity of life. Enough blades of grass will completely destroy the concrete in time, turn it back to soil. Sometimes, we must be like blades of grass, growing where we landed as seeds, reaching for the sun with every cell of our being, wedging a bigger and bigger hole in the concrete, bit by bit, wearing it down.
I pray that you heal from this trauma. I pray you find the strength you need and understanding to know the best use of your energy and time. When you can do no more, celebrate life.
Alanna, you have given your life over to helping people, even if helping means sitting in an office and writing reports right now. All the evidence says you do NOT turn a blind eye to the suffering around you, but that you do what you can with what you have to help.
I think it’s okay and even productive to let these things break your heart. But doing all you can do with all the tools and abilities at your disposal is enough – better than enough. Peace, my friend.
Laura – but how do you know when you’re achieved “all you can?”
As horrifying as this is, I actually have a different question: What the hell was a toddler doing running around by herself on the street?
This reminds me of my “security training” with ex-special forces, in which they showed us a caricatured video of a woman in an unnamed SE Asian country who stops at an “accident” beside the road and is kidnapped and presumably sexually assaulted.
Basically my organization was telling me to be a bystander.
One of the most outrageous moments in my “aid” career.
It’s a shitty world. No two ways about it.
I agree with Laura: the fact that this kind of thing leaves you raw is, in the end, a good thing.
Let’s drink to staying broken-hearted-able.
~J.
The bystander effect is not a story of our age, but a story of human condition. People have been bystanders since our earliest histories and it is only in the modern sensibility that it has become more frowned upon. Bystanding is part of being human, just as suffering is.
It doesn’t make that story any less heartrending, but I think its important to keep in mind. None of this is new.
This was a really powerful post that echos a lot of what I have been feeling recently in regards to my own role in oppression and inequality. I too work abroad, and I too walk past pain and suffering on a daily basis. We have to learn to live with ourselves.
I hate to say this….but your last sentence of this blog says it all….
“I don’t know what to do.!!!”
the same attitude lead to that child’s death…..
no one knows what to do and when….!!!!
@ K. Pruthul- Her attitude is not one of apathy- her ‘I don’t know what to do’ is simply communicating a frustration and shock, an expression of her dismay at the events, around the death of a toddler. It is an attempt to address the problem and prevent its occurance by raising awareness.
I work under high pressure- looking after the wellbeing of women- I operate, I deliver babies, I also perform surgeries for hours, all with the aim to end suffering.
I’m lucky- because I haven’t become cynical and inhumane.
And I can only assume, that it is when people have no insight, no self strength nor awareness of the world, no voice outside their own doubts and fears- that narrow mindedness sets in. (Much like Ms. Grace earlier referred to.. )
Noone knows how they will react to a massive shock- we all only hope we react in a humane way. And when we don’t, we hope someone will forgive us and more so- we might be able to forgive ourselves.
So rather than critiquing a vulnerable or kind thought or wondering- in the awful moments of grief and despair I have been witness to- I understand and value that we are all connected. And I am grateful for people like Alanna who work hard to remind us so, who sacrifice, not because they have no choice- but because they chose to.
I make that same choice every day, and every night. And despite the criticism, I stand by my choice, because I feel lucky I have one- where the majority of women and vulnerable members in this world’s society do not.
I think it’s okay and even productive to let these things break your heart. But doing all you can do with all the tools and abilities at your disposal is enough – better than enough.
“I am already the kind of person who can ignore a toddler in pain, as long as she’s not in my line of sight.”
Peter Singer makes this argument in his book, “The Life You Can Save,” where he says that a toddler in front of you should be the same as the toddler halfway around the world. His assumption is that you would do anything to help the toddler in front of you (which didn’t seem to happen here..). So he says if you think you would do whatever it takes to help that toddler, then you should be able to give almost all that you have to help alleviate all injustices, here or far away.
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4722934-the-life-you-can-save
Anyway, your comments reminded me of this book, which I found convincing, but personally challenging.
If I recall, there is some greater cultural models that talks about the dimensons where (in the super general sense) Chinese folks care about what is in their back yard and not that which is in someone else’s backyard. This is a reason why they (and Lesotho, I believe, make fabulous places for factories wherein workers rights are not the highest priority) The Baby wasn’t in the backyard on 19 people… but it was the Street-sweepers yard –and he did something.
(anyway, late to the comment party — but this was the first thing that came to mind)
Coming from a 20 yr old I believe the bystander effect stems from the way most things have always been taken care of by other people already in our lives. So when something such as your global warming ex occur we just automatically think there are bigger powers our they that will fix it.