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11/25/2008: "“I’m not sure, Officer, I think it was a walk-by ignoring…”"

There’s an old joke about a snail that is mugged by a couple of turtles. When the police arrive they as the snail to describe the muggers and the snail replies, “I’m not sure…it all happened so fast!”

Dudley and I frequently talk with our readers and workshop participants about the notion of a person’s “worldview” and its relationship to the space-time-complexity domain in which they operate. But a few recent examples in Time magazine have renewed my astonishment at just how small the social space in America has become. One article tells of traffic police who watch in amazement as a highway camera shows 75 cars driving past a man lying on the pavement (a victim of a hit-and-run accident and sprawled no more than a few feet from the flow of traffic) before someone finally stopped to offer assistance. Another story tells of a woman who collapsed on the floor in the waiting area of a hospital emergency room. The hospital video revealed employees ignoring her for more than an hour before finally realizing that she was dead. (If you don’t believe me, you can watch it on You Tube.)

But these are only a couple of the more egregious examples of the insensitivity of a common politic that has grown long on bravado and very, very short on compassion. When discussing space, time, and complexity I like to talk about them on a continuum. Time goes from short to long, complexity goes from one to many, and space goes from small to big. These various scales came into play for me as I watched the fireworks on the 4th of July as they splayed out in blazing glory behind decidedly the biggest phallic symbol in Washington besides the one residing in the White House. And as I joined with millions of Americans in our annual orgy of martial testosterone, beer, and barbecue I had the somewhat amusing thought, “You can have one, small, and short or you can have many, long, and big!”

However, it wasn’t that funny when I also realized that we seem to easily band together to celebrate our independence and freedom but we seem all too often to balk at supporting each other in equally important ways. In the day-to-day world our antennae seem to pull in and our sphere of perception frequently narrows to our own concerns and ambitions, blinding us to the opportunities we have to help those around us who could really use a helping hand. Like the biblical people of rank and wealth, of religious and political correctness who crossed the road to avoid helping the man of little account who lay cut and bleeding by the wayside, we either just don’t see the opportunity or actively choose to ignore it. But in the celebration of our nation’s birth what do we want for America to stand for, the Pharisee or the Samaritan, the cars that drive by because something or someone more important is occupying their thoughts, or the person who decides to stop? I think our very survival may hang on the answer to that question.

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