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Have you ever seen the show, What Would You Do? If not, a brief little summary of it: it’s a hidden camera show, where they set up different everyday scenarios to catch people’s reactions. Generally they’re situations where someone should speak up and this show captures just that; are people compelled to act or mind their own business?
Recently I’ve really been thinking about these situations. So often we see them and so often we do nothing about it. I don’t think we do it because we’re mean, in fact I hardly doubt that’s the case. I think it’s more so the bystander effect taking place. The thought that there are several other people around and they’ll step up to the plate. Well the other day as I said something about a situation that I didn’t feel was right (which is rare and something I need to get better about) I was reminded of something that happened back when I was in high school. I had a friend who’s Dad saw a car flipped over on the side of the road. Dozens of cars were driving by and no one stopped. He decided he should stop and ended up finding a young girl trapped inside. No one stopped. She had been trapped like that for close to 20 minutes. That may not seem like very long, but on a busy road where people are constantly driving by she shouldn’t have sat there more than 30 seconds. This reminds me of another story, again having to do with driving. This time a girl was exiting the freeway. When the light turned green she proceeded to go, but her car died all of a sudden, in the middle of the intersection. Rather than someone hopping out to help her, people honked and honked and got angry that she was stalled in their way. She was in tears and scared. What no one knew, is she didn’t have any legs. She couldn’t just hop out of the car and try to find a solution. Eventually someone helped her, but it took way longer than it needed to and no one stood up for her.
My point of these stories and this blog post, you don’t know someone’s circumstances or their story. Don’t assume that someone else will help, that they can figure it out on their own, step up. You don’t have to doing anything drastic, but a simple, “do you need help?” can make a whirlwind of differences. So next time you see something not right, first make sure it’s a safe situation and then make the decision to make a difference!
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