Actually, I’m a self-righteous urbanite living right smack in the center of a major city with a population of almost 5 million.
True enough. My running partner lives in a neighbourhood with lot of homeless people and sees them snoozing in the park all the time. It’s when you see something about that situation that makes you pause and say “that ain’t right” that you should do something.
In the case described in the OP, someone who is not responding to the cold water from a sprinkler suggests a bit of help is required. In the case of my running partner, the old man she found was sprawled across the sidewalk and not snoozing under a tree the way most of the Listerine-drinking homeless guys do when they nap.
A homeless guy sleeping in the shade of a tree in summer, or a warm subway grate in cool weather is “ordinary” in some places. A homeless guy who doesn’t notice a sprinkler raining on him is “unusual.”
Besides, drunk/stoned and passed out to the point of being unresponsive is a medical emergency, whether you’re a frat boy coming form a New Year’s party, or a homeless crackhead who drank a bottle of Scope.
And just to repeat a point that has been made before, we have no way of knowing if the person in question was a “bum” or a homeless guy. Despit several direct questions, **Rigamarole **declined to offer any justification for calling him that.
Here’s your answer for why the community is spanking Rigamarole:
We are taking a rogue member of society to task, because they are going against the grain, and we realize that such an attitude is a danger to society as a whole. That person might not have been a bum, and even if they were homeless, there but for the grace of Og go one of us, or one of our loved ones. That is why there is such outrage.
I respectfully disagree. To me it is not there but for the grace of Og go I, or one of us. That person IS one of us. We are ALL one of us. Does that mean I am ignorant of the concept of social strata and class systems? No. I’m not a dolt. But at the most basic level, that person in dire distress is Us. And in a moment of need, the OP’er didn’t see that. He saw something less than a human in need.
It is the unspoken horrific “them” attitude of the OP’er that is nauseating and is causing, at least in my mind, the need to reply with vitriol. Which I did back there somewhere. And will do again.
Fuck that elitist better-than-Them attitude. Pal, one day you will be them, and in dire need and frightened that the same cold callous souls as yourself are happily passing you by. Is that not sad?
I fully agree with your sentiment, however there are those of us who sit comfortably in thier homes and think it won’t happen to them, that they won’t end up in such dire straits. Yes, they are “us”, and yes it is my business if someone is lying in the sprinklers and not waking up because not only are they a person, but they could be me (and certainly they are worth just as much as I am anyway) one day. I was pointing out the other side of the coin, as to why they should “bother” helping is all.
You got it, that was it. You’re right, not quite the same situation as here.
I’m just wondering why you’re distinguishing between criminals and bums/hobos/dregs of society.
Are you saying that all bums are just victims of circumstance and all criminals have made intentional free choices about their actions? If you saw a criminal (not sure how you would know, but just for argument’s sake) lying on the lawn, would your reaction be different? If so, why?
Do the people whom our society charges with emergency response (ER docs and nurses, EMTs, firefighers, etc.) make such a distinction?
I was making the distinction to illustrate how some people seem to hold more contempt for homeless people than they do for criminals. I didn’t say that one was more or less worthy of saving than the other. I also pointed out that some homeless are indeed homeless by choice, which may fuel some people’s apathy, but that neither does it make them any less worthy of helping. Moreover, all of it is moot anyway because the OP made no attempt to find out any of this. Not that it is his place to nor was he under any obligation to, but neither does this mean that he shouldn’t still have been a little more proactive in his decision to do something.
It wouldn’t matter who I saw were in my lawn – I wouldn’t even think to find out because it is immaterial to his seeming need for help.
Nope. le sigh
Huh. I could have sworn I saw you refer to your husband in some other thread, but I must have you confused with someone else.
Unfortunately, sometimes they are that callous too.
Well, I purposely did not in include police in my question, as I did not want to invite tales of police brutality. Your link is to a charge of callousness, not a finding of callousness.
I suupose I could amend my question to "As a rule … "
True, I should also say that as a rule emergency service workers do carry out their duties regardless of the social status of the victim.
The case I linked to was an aberration and despite the internal investigation that “cleared the officers of wrong doing” the report noted that the victim did have a pulse and was breathing at the time the officers called and reported a “dead homeless guy” on the bench in front of their headquarters (which is two blocks from the hospital). They did not attempt to check his vitals or perform CPR which could have saved his life. That is why there was a call for a coroner’s inquest (rather than the internal investigation) and the civil action against the police.
The ambulance staff however, execute their jobs to the letter: got there within 5 minutes and tried to save the guy’s life. Very sad.
Sorry about that, faithfool, I went back to the post and I still don’t get it. Maybe I really am on the path to the long good-bye. Or maybe I just lost my “cool” too many years ago. 
No worries Largo. I usually am a tad transparent 'round these here parts. 
I wasn’t actually around then, as it was before my time, but apparently somebody (named piebold or something like it, I think) led everyone on a merry chase over a girl he supposedly met that wore pajama pants at the time. Sounds like a tale I’d probably have been sucked into also, but it turned out he was having a bit of the old ‘leg pull.’ Needless to say, the Doper community was non-plussed (as well within their rights) and said situation has (I thought) kind of become part of SDMB lore.
Nope, the fellow was Skewbald and here is the original, erm, entertaining thread. Then this was the pit thread it spawned. Fun reading indeed. :o
Seems to me no one ever proved he was lying. The story was improbable, maybe, but improbable things happen all the time.
True, and I hope I didn’t come across as definitive in some sort of implication, because that certainly wasn’t my intention. Sorry if I came off that way. I’d only hoped to show a parallel between that and this, which we as a group would never be able to verify successfully either. And to me, it just hasn’t had to quite-right ring of “you just had to be there!” to understand content. But hey, perhaps that’s only me and Largo. 