After America - Mark Steyn [90]
H. G. Wells’ Time-Traveler writes of the softened Eloi:
It happened that, as I was watching some of the little people bathing in a shallow, one of them was seized with cramp and began drifting downstream. The main current ran rather swiftly, but not too strongly for even a moderate swimmer. It will give you an idea, therefore, of the strange deficiency in these creatures, when I tell you that none made the slightest attempt to rescue the weakly crying little thing which was drowning before their eyes.
Instead, it is Wells’ Victorian gentleman who leaps in the river, rescues the poor girl, and brings her back to land. He did what any man would have done, didn’t he?
Are you sure about that? As I say, the author’s dystopian vision is off only insofar as the world he predicted showed up 800,000 years ahead of schedule. In Wells’ Britain in the early twenty-first century, men routinely stand around watching girls drown.
In May 2010, a 37-year-old woman was drowning in the River Clyde while police officers called to the scene stood on the bank and watched.125 “As a matter of procedure it’s not the responsibility of the police to go in the water,” explained a spokesperson, sniffily, “it’s the Fire and Rescue Service.” And, as they weren’t there yet, tough. The woman would have died had not three Glasgow University students jumped in to save her. Needless to say, the students were in complete breach of “matters of procedure.”
In February 2010, a 5-year-old girl was trapped in a car submerged in the icy River Avon for two hours while West Mercia Police stood around on the bank watching.126 They were “prevented” from diving in to rescue her by “safety regulations.” In 2007, two police officers watched as a 10-year-old boy, Jordon Lyon, drowned in a swimming pool in Wigan.127 The same year, fireman Tam Brown dived into the River Tay to rescue a drowning girl and got her back to shore, only to find he was now subject to a disciplinary investigation by Tayside Fire Service.128
In 2008, Alison Hume fell sixty feet down an abandoned mine shaft. An 18-strong rescue crew arrived, but the senior officer said that a recent memo had banned the use of rope equipment for rescuing members of the public. It could only be used to rescue fellow firefighters. So Alison Hume died, in compliance with the memo.129
Could this sort of thing happen in America? Oh, it already does. In 2010, KING-TV in Seattle broadcast footage of three “security guards” at a downtown bus station standing around watching while a 15-year-old girl was brutally beaten for her purse, phone, and iPod.130 But it’s okay, the “guards” were “just following orders not to interfere.” The victim later told police that she had deliberately stood next to the “guards” while waiting for her bus thinking it would be the safest place. As the video shows, she was punched and slammed against the wall while standing adjacent to so-called “security”—and still they did nothing. And King’s County Sheriff ’s Department congratulated the “men” on their forbearance: “The guards were right to follow their training.”
You have to be “trained” to stand around doing nothing?
Recall Harvey Mansfield’s definition of manliness—“confidence in the face of risk”—and then look at the helmets grown men wear to take a Sunday bicycle ride ’round a suburban park. As for Plato’s concept of “thumos”—an animal instinct to bristle at the sense of danger—the