The Shadow-gloom and Weight of the Sacred

Several years ago Gretchen and I were taking a weekend trip and on the way we passed a couple stranded on the side of the road. They waved at us in a pleading fashion as we drove passed them; it looked like they had some serious axel damage. I didn't want to stop. There wasn't anyone else around, so all notions of diffusion of responsibility or bystander effect could not have been in play. Primarily, I just didn't want to be bothered with these people, but I pulled over and stopped the car about a hundred yards passed the stranded couple looking for help. As I walked up to them they asked, "Do you have a hydraulic jack?" I glanced back at the Mitsubishi Lancer that I was driving at the time. "No," I said.

They were drunk. This was not a speculative drunkenness--the type I'd long for a few years after this event as I rode the ubahn to German class--this was verifiable inebriation. I was glad they had ran their truck off into the ditch so they couldn't drive it into another vehicle. Turns out they had already walked to a nearby house and called someone for help. I'm not sure why they then returned to their truck to flag down cars, but, as Ulysses Everett McGill says, it's the fool who seeks logic in the chambers of the human heart. Or, in this case, the chambers of a sauced liver.

"Where are you from?" one of them asked. I was a little nervous. I knew I couldn't help them, they knew I couldn't help them, and they had allegedly already called someone who could help them. Plus, I'd watched too many horror movies and heard too many stories of good samaritans who stop to help someone only to find themselves robbed or worse.

"Mustang." I said. It wasn't a complete falsehood.

"Get out of town!" The man said. "My daughter lives in Mustang. Do you know Shather?" He didn't give a last name.

"No," I said with some discernible trepidation, I'm sure. "I don't think I know Shather."

After a few more rounds of question and answer I apologized for being unable to help, but they said that didn't matter. The important thing is that I stopped because no one else stopped. No one stops for someone else these days, they said. I wanted to look over my shoulder as I walked back to my car because I had that acid-churning feeling in my gut that one of them had a tire iron and intended to clunk me over the head with it. Again, I've seen too many movies. Too many CSI episodes. Too much of the news. I fought that urge. I didn't want to judge them as evil. Maybe they were drunk and driving, but was just stupid. It didn't make them murderers. I guess they made it home ok. Their truck was gone when we drove back through at the end of our weekend trip.

It was a harmless situation but I was scared the entire time. I've been trained to think a certain way about situations like this and the training is a process of negative reinforcement to say the least. If it had been dark (it was early evening, by the way), I know I would not have stopped. I'm glad I did though. I'm glad that, when I look back over the last few years at the opportunities I had to do something when something needed to be done that, at least this one time, I tried. I wish I had done something on the ubahn that morning. However meager my offering of help may have been, I wish that I'd offered.

Perhaps it's appropriate that we don't know any of the names of the 38 people who could have helped Kitty. I suspect that, if I searched diligently enough, that their names are out there, but they're not known the way Kitty is known. They're a group. What we know about them is what they didn't do. It doesn't bother me if no one remembers me when I'm gone. That's not something that motivates me to act a certain way. It is interesting, nonetheless, that victims and heroes are remembered while bystanders are largely forgotten.