The Bystander Effect

I’ve been watching the Olympics. Many may call the bi-annual event a celebration of international cooperation, but, while I think these competitions can be beneficial to the global society, I also think it highlights the degree of ignorance to which several people adhere to day by day. In a world with an ever increasing population (7.125 billion in 2013), the Earth is becoming its own monumental example of the Bystander Effect. This social psychological phenomenon refers to a case in which individuals do not offer help to a victim when others are present. This probability is inversely related to the number of bystanders. This means, the more people, the less likely someone will step up to help. When you take a moment to think about it, as a whole, our diffusion of responsibility as a global population has reached a grotesque level. Right now, there are an estimated 795 million suffering from chronic undernourishment, according to the World Food Programme. That’s 1 in 9 people. In other words, each day 8 out of 9 of us turn the other cheek to ignore this glaring problem. I’m guilty of it and so are you. Each morning I grab my smart phone off my night stand in my 72-degree air conditioned room, turn on my bed lamp to flood my room with light and read morning headlines from news accounts I follow on Twitter. As I did this yesterday, I saw the following Tweet from the New York Times : “The image of Omran, 5, captured the attention of a public numb to Syrian suffering. He is one of thousands.” The image shows the 5-year-old covered in dust and blood due to the ongoing war in Syria. This headline hit my feed along with stories about Olympic athletes and their gold medal counts, Olympic athletes and their ridiculous drunken shenanigans, and an increasingly repugnant rhetoric that is the media’s coverage of the 2016 election. I’m not saying these other headlines aren’t important, but I think we need to draw more attention to the unrest plaguing our world today. In the next 30 years,the global population is expected to grow to 9.7 billion people, according to The Guardian. We have to stop turning our heads away from other people’s problems. You may feel like there’s nothing you can do about the war in Syria and that’s okay. All I desire is an awareness by the people who live in the richest countries in the world to know about these problems and think about them. Once people put some effort into thinking about these problems, maybe, just maybe, they will go donate to their own community’s food pantry or help out a less fortunate neighbor or even do something as simple as share this post to people who weren’t aware this many people go hungry each day. Global development is necessary. It’s necessary to sustain our future generations, to keep the peace and to evolve our society for the better. I will leave you with this quote from a recent White House press release, “Global development is not ‘charity.’ In an increasingly interconnected world, it’s a crucial investment in the security and prosperity of us all.”