Sarah’s paper: a message to us all?

 

And it just goes on, and on, and on…

 

As I write this, our Sarah is a freshman at Franciscan University. She is majoring in social work.

 

During the last year, Sarah wrote a research paper on how group dynamics influence individual behavior, for the good, and for the bad.

 

On the “for the bad” side, and as a dramatic start to the paper, Sarah cites the brutal murder of Kitty Genovese in New York in 1964. Ms. Genovese was coming home from work late one night when she was accosted by a knife wielding attacker in front of her apartment. They struggled for more than a half hour, as this young woman desperately screamed and pleaded for help. Although 30 some people looked on from their apartment windows, and such, nobody ran to her assistance – and, unbelievably, nobody even called the police.

 

At about 35 minutes, Ms. Genovese was stabbed to death.

 

And therein, I believe, is a tremendous metaphoric bellwether for our country these days.

 

On April 20, 1999, the Columbine High School massacre killed 12 students, a teacher and 21 others were injured. Yet the school shootings go on, and on, and on… as a majority of Americans, as with what happened with the apathetic bystanders in the New York killing, just look on, and on, and on… at all this without doing much of anything.

 

Our inner cities have become war zones with eight youth being shot to death every day now. As a majority of Americans, again, just look on, and on, and on… without doing much of anything.

 

Some 4,400 babies are killed in their mother’s wombs every day now in America (55 million babies killed since 1973), while a majority of people channel surf for the next show.

 

Global warming looms like a scary doomsday scenario that is already killing scores of people in more arid countries in other parts of the world, through drought and famine -- yet a majority of Americans, watching all this tragedy on the nightly news, do virtually nothing to curb their energy gluttonous lifestyles.

 

And I could go on, and on…

 

Sarah’s research paper points out that: “Group dynamics can lead the individual to believe: Someone else will do it.” (Griggs, 304)

 

This allowed the killing in New York. This is allowing the killing, and all sorts of other tragedies, to continue to go on in America, and beyond.

 

And not only isn’t there much inertia around pro-actively impacting these problem areas of our society, and of the world at large; but Americans have also fallen victim to a dangerous, collective “groupthink,” if you will, that has us using all sorts of rationalizations (rational lies) to justify not doing much to change these things.

 

For instance, the UN reports 24,000 people starve to death every day in the Third World. And Americans, almost across the board, could do so much more in the way of lifestyle sacrifices to help these people. But often one, of many, standard ‘rationalizations’ is that these poorer countries governments are “corrupt” and the money wouldn’t get to the people who need it.

 

Even though there are now all kinds of safe conduits (Food for the Poor, Heifer International, Habitat for Humanity, Doctors without Borders…) to get the money to the people who need it.

 

It’s time to read Sarah’s paper and clearly see ourselves in those 30 bystanders that fateful night in New York. It’s time to WAKE UP AMERICA!