It was a cold and rainy evening and my fiance had called me and asked if I could pick her up from the bus stop up the street. Her umbrella had broken in the wind and the weather was miserable so I agreed to it. The rain was coming down quite hard and the sky was beginning to darken as it does around 4:30pm these late fall days on the west (wet) coast. I came to a stop at one of the intersections up the road and noticed a car was pulling out to turn left. In the meantime, what looked to be a student staring down at his phone began walking out across the intersection after hearing the audible beep that signaled he was able to do so. Not only was he wearing a dark set of clothes, his umbrella was dark and he hadn't even looked up from his phone to check that the coast was clear. Meanwhile, the car that had slowly pulled out to turn left began doing so and it was becoming more and more apparent to me that he simply did not see the young man crossing. I started talking to myself as I sometimes do in these sorts of situations, swearing at the driver for being a blind idiot, cursing the student who was clueless to the impending danger he was walking into. Thinking back on it now, it seemed like I was watching a slow moving train wreck. The car was turning slowly and the student was keeping pace with the corner of the car's window frame and neither of them had any clue that the other was there. I slammed my hand onto my horn! The driver of the car seemed to wake up a bit and suddenly swerved to the left. The student also looked over at me just in time to notice that the car was within inches of his hip. He did a matrix style leap forward and lightly bounced off the hood of the car while recovering in a standing position. If my jaw hadn't dropped all the way to the floor by now, it certainly did when I witnessed what happened next. The car slowly (and I mean extremely slowly...2 mph maybe) continued driving up the street, presumably looking behind at the student to gauge a reaction. The student just looked on at the car as it slowly moved away from him. When it was clear the car wasn't going to stop and apologize or see if he was alright, he simply went onto his phone again and finished whatever he was doing on it prior to the incident. The folks in the car, noticing he wasn't going to pursue them, simply sped up and drove off.
Societal values have really fallen by the way side in the 30 years I've been breathing air. People are so afraid of being sued that they would rather continue driving then get out and take responsibility for their mistake. The student, on the other hand, couldn't even take the time to address the moral turpitude that he had witnessed. It is scary to think about the driver of the car getting away with literally hitting someone and driving off but I find it even more chilling to imagine a world in which our youth start lacking the mental fortitude to address these sorts of assaults. It's a world of numbness. Numbness to a sense of accountability, and severity of the mistake for the driver. Numbness to a sense of onus in personal safety (wearing dark clothes on a rainy, dark night), surrounding reality, and to the severity of the driver's mistake.
There has always been degrees of benevolence and malevolence in our societies. Maybe the slumping core values and loose morals that society displays all to often these days isn't actually new. Perhaps it only seems like the levels of moral corruption have increased due to the drastic increase in human communication. After all, nobody would have known about this incident if I hadn't just posted this article. Your thoughts?
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