Hell in a handbasket...

I saw a thing on youtube.com some time ago and it chilled me to the bone. Seriously...

It was a short something about an experiment some guy was doing and how desensitized people were to things going on around them and have adopted the "it's not my concern, let someone else take care of it..." mentality.

So, this is how it worked. He had this little girl, school aged... Maybe 8 or 9 I guess, pretend that she was in distress. She was being grabbed and dragged off by a "stranger". It was in the middle of the day, on a rather crowded sidewalk. She was pleading with people to help her. She was yelling out "Who are you? I don't know you!" and stuff like "You're not my daddy! Stop! Please help!"
There was no denying that she got people's attention. Most of them stopped to look and see what was going on, but then continued to walk away. Some people went as far as crossing the street to avoid reaching the "commotion" on the sidewalk. Really? Some time later, after several runs... Someone finally stopped. A group of guys who FINALLY took notice, stopped and were going to do something.
The scary part is, if this had been a real incident, that girl would have been taken along with six or seven more... (Not too sure how many tries they took before someone finally stopped, but I think the guy mentioned that they had been there for a pretty lengthy amount of time... A couple of hours maybe?)
It's sad to me that even a child crying out for help won't call forth action by the average citizen. Even with the horror stories of child abduction stories and the number of missing children reported and the atrocities committed on children that we see on the news, see in the papers, hear on the radio... Amber alerts and pleas from parents on television desperately trying to be reunited with their children... People turn a blind eye...
Now stop and think about this for a minute. Imagine the number of child abduction cases that have occurred. They can't all have been in the middle of nowhere, in a dark alley, where no one saw anything... If someone had taken a minute out of their lives, I think some of those kids would probably be home now, doing whatever it is that kids are supposed to be doing, instead of being a statistic. Maybe it's because I'm a parent and these kind of things hit closer to home. I would think it shouldn't matter when a child is concerned... How does that phrase go? It takes a village to raise a child? Well, the village is on the highway to hell. Most people are so wrapped up in their own shit, that they really don't care about anything outside themselves. They are more worried about covering their own rear ends, they are worried more about how the world perceives them, they are more concerned about the things they are able to get away with, they are more concerned about what is theirs, what they perceive to be theirs, what they wish was theirs and using underhanded methods to get at them because they deserve it, damn it! It's none of any body else's business as long as I get what I want and to hell with everyone who isn't me. Innocents get trampled along the way and of course everything get self justified and that's all that matters.
It makes trying to follow the high road difficult... This new path I have been working to pave for myself has been frustrating. It's so easy to get sucked back in to the negativity spirals because it's simple. It takes no effort at all to be a nasty, self righteous, selfish piece of shit. All you have to worry about is yourself. There's too much of that in the world. But I will admit, the high road and paving a path positivity has been a difficult task. Do a falter? Sure. I'm only friggin' human. Will it keep me from trying again? Hell no. I'm stronger than that. Would I have stopped and given that guy a righteous beating before I asked questions? Yeah... Yeah I would have. Most definitely.