It was with no small sense of horror that I watched a clip of video from a street corner camera in Hartford, CT, replayed on each hour’s newscast on cable networks. It showed a 78-year-old man being sideswiped by a first car, and then catapulted over a second car, his body cart wheeling into the air until it slammed onto the pavement to lay shattered and still. Blurry as the image was, there was no mistaking that his bent, twisted, so heartbreakingly slight form was unmoving.
It would seem that this, by itself, was the horror. Ghastly as it might be to imagine there was something more horrific, there was. For a full minute, cars in the other lane…..passed by. Pedestrians on the sidewalk…..looked on. And did nothing. Beyond stopping to watch curiously, no one approached. No one.
A man lay still in obvious distress and no one rushed to his aid. No one blocked traffic. Not a single person went to him. No one knelt by his side to comfort him. In the most hideous definition of the word, ‘spectators’ stood by, unmoved and unmoving.
Hundreds of miles away, hours removed, I watched and was horrified.
And ashamed. Deeply, personally ashamed. There was no gunfire. No snipers. No fanatical militia with a suicidal thirst for martyrdom. No forest fire. No earthquake, hurricane, tidal wave. An ordinary day on an ordinary street in the most ordinary of American cities. No one was under threat of death or injury. And, as an old man lay, probably dying, no one did anything. And I felt ashamed.
Ashamed of myself. For as much as I ached to condemn every anonymous person recorded in the camera’s eye, my own shame eclipsed my capacity for blame. Shame for my inaction in the face of criminal conduct by my own government. Shame for my silent acquiescence as my elected officials betrayed their oaths to protect my rights and those of my fellow Americans. Shame for keeping quiet in the face of thundering evidence that we are shackling America’s next generation and many to follow to a debt they had no voice in signing on to. Shame for doing nothing as other people’s children were sent to fight, sacrifice, or die.
As deeply satisfying as it would be to bathe in the self-righteous glow of condemnation, as salving as it would be to cast great big stones of blame at those people on that Connecticut street, my hypocritically narrow shoulders can’t bear the strain of that hypocrisy.
Bearing that stain, I offer this apology to every American family who sends a hero into sincere service, to every American family who struggles believing in the promise of the greatest nation in the history. I am sorry. I am sorry I didn’t do more, something more, even just a little more. I should have spoken out louder, more often. I should have thought harder and with more skepticism. I should have done the least little thing expected of an American. To act. To do something.
However little comfort it may be to those who’ve lost a soldier, sailor, airman, marine, I promise I won’t stand on the sidewalk anymore. I won’t watch without stepping up, stepping into traffic. To those who struggle, it will not be your shame if I turn a deaf ear to your murmurs for just a little break.
It will be my shame.
And I won’t shame myself again.
