In the wee hours of March 13, 1964, Catherine “Kitty” Genovese finished her shift as a bar manager at Ev’s Eleventh Hour Club in Queens, New York and headed home. She parked her car in a parking lot near her neighborhood and began walking to her apartment. Winston Mosley was waiting for her.
He attacked Genovese on the sidewalk, stabbing her repeatedly. She screamed “Oh my God! He stabbed me! Please help me! Please help me!”
A neighbor turned on his exterior lights and shouted at Mosley, and Mosley fled. But when hey saw no help was coming, he returned.
Genovese had made it to someone’s doorstep, but Mosley caught her and stabbed her again. Genovese screamed she was dying and neighborhood lights came on again, forcing Mosley to flee once more.
By 3:25 AM, Genovese had made it to the rear of her apartment building and entered through an unlocked door. Once inside, she collapsed. Mosely followed her in and found her unconscious. He raped her, took her money and stabbed her one final time.
At 3:50 AM, Karl Ross, one of the thirty-seven witnesses to Genovese’s attack and murder, finally called 911. When the police arrived, Genovese was already dead. When asked why he waited so long to report the crime, Ross said “I didn’t want to get involved.”
On June 4, 2008, Angel Arce Torres was struck by a hit-and-run driver and thrown down in the middle of a busy Hartford, Connecticut street. Pedestrian witnesses and onlookers simply gawked and walked on. One driver paused briefly and drove off. A man on a scooter circled the victim and then zipped away. Finally, a police cruiser, responding to an unrelated call, spotted Torres in the street and stopped to help.
Bryant Hayre, a witness to the incident, said he didn’t feel comfortable with helping Angel Torres because he was uncounscious and bleeding. Torres’ hit-and-run assailant has yet to be apprehended. Doctors say he will never return home from the hospital because he can’t breathe without a respirator.
It’s easy to condemn the witnesses who were slow to respond to Kitty Genovese’s attack. And we’re all disgusted with the callousness of the passersby who left Angel Torres lying in the street. Fellow human beings were in distress and folks like Ross and Hayre couldn’t be bothered. Crimes were committed under their noses and their responses were odious.
It’s easy to feel indignant and cast aspersions at Ross and Hayre; they’re easy targets. But while we publicly stone conspicuous perpetrators of indifference and dereliction, the bulk of the guilty escape without notice.
At this exact moment in our planet’s history, the most diabolical crimes against nature and humanity are being methodically committed at a horrifying rate and we couldn’t care less. We “don’t want to get involved” or “don’t feel comfortable” making a stand.
The shameful, willful destruction of our ecosystems and the contamination of our oceans, our air, our atmosphere, our soils, our forests and our water sources are being carried out at this very instant. The polar ice caps are almost history. Coral reefs are dying. Plant life is retreating uphill. Animal life is being sequestered and extinguished. Storm systems are growing in force and frequency. Lands are being decimated by drought and pestilence. And we—key witnesses to these cataclysmic events—are oblivious. All we’re concerned about is the price of gas.
Every day we haplessly feed the hand that bites us. Instead of dropping bombs on desert zealots in Iraq and Afghanistan, we should be demolishing coal-fired power plants and oil refineries. Instead of fighting a war on drugs, we should be fighting against greed and capitalism run amok. Instead of building border walls, we should be building green coalitions, neighborhood agricultural co-ops and affordable solar energy applications. Instead of allowing big oil and gas conglomerates to reap obscene profits, we should be garnishing their revenues to redress past environmental misdeeds and fund ocean “dead zone” reclamations, safe renewable energy campaigns and wide-scale wildlife conservation.
The signs of criminal environmental calamities are all around us, but apathy, ignorance and complacence keep us actively inert, perpetually heedless and chronically unbothered by our role in the devastation.
In this regard are we any better than Ross or Hayre?
In the end, weren’t they both accomplices? In the grand scheme of things, aren’t we?