Are Americans Just Terrible People?

[jimmy olsen]

What say you Languish? 

https://eand.co/are-americans-just-terrible-people-9e15f496a1b3

Are Americans Just Terrible People?

Do Americans Get How Weirdly Twisted and Cruel Their Society Has Become?

umair haque
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Aug 21 · 12 min read

I know, I know. The title probably makes you mad. Good. It's a serious question. Let me tell you a little story, about my afternoon. It's a story that I've seen happen more times than I can count. Then go ahead and judge me if you like for asking such a rude question — or maybe by then you might just be asking it yourself.
We're spending the summer in the States. In one of America's oldest towns. A quaint little place on the East Coast, with a little downtown street full of cafes and restaurants. It's a liberal town, deep blue, generous in spirit, full of people who pride themselves on being good, decent, and humane.

Now, writers need cafes, and so I'm always on the lookout for one. Recently, I discovered that one of those cafes in particular has good vibes, and so I've begun to go there to write, and finish up songs I'm working on.

It was the late afternoon, about 5pm. My lovely wife asked me if I wanted to go to the cafe. Sure, I said. I had a little song to finish up, full of sunshine and summer vibes. Off we went. We'd forgotten it was near closing time, though, so we got our coffees, and instead of sitting down, we went outside to have our coffees.

I lit up a cigarette, and then frowned. Just to our left, maybe twenty feet away, was what looked like a pile of garbage. People were stepping over it. I looked more closely. The pile of garbage was shaking. And moaning. It was, I realized, to my horror, a person.

Who'd collapsed on the sidewalk. In serious and severe distress.
It had been a hot day here — wasn't it everywhere, this summer? This person — a homeless man, clutching two garbage bags, full of his belongings, was lying there on the sidewalk. He was shaking and moaning. He was convulsing.
It was an emergency. Wasn't it?

People were literally walking over him. This was a busy street. It was Friday evening now. People were on the way home from work, to the restaurants, to the bars. They stepped over the man who was collapsed, convulsing in pain.

A large, angry man stepped over him, and got into a giant pickup truck...with a cross painted on the back. Wait, what was it Jesus had said again? Ignore those who've fallen among you?

Nobody was helping the man literally convulsing in pain on the sidewalk.
The street was full of diners on terraces. Laughing, talking, eating, drinking. They all — incredibly — ignored the man collapsed on the sidewalk, moaning and trembling in pain.

I couldn't believe it. And yet I could. I thought: it was happening again. You see, this happened on a regular basis everywhere I've ever lived in America. New York, Chicago, Washington DC, LA, San Francisco, the little town I'm in now.
It was a regular feature of American life to simply ignore people and literally let them die on the street. You just stepped over them. You pretend they don't exist. You don't lift a finger to help.

At least if you're a normal American.

Remember, this is a liberal town. Even in this bastion of what passes for decency in America, nobody lifted a finger to help a man who was literally dying on the street.
Not a single one of those people who thought of themselves as good and decent and kind and generous.

And that makes America really, really different. Bizarre. Perverse. Ugly. Obscene. In a way that is totally, completely absolutely different from anywhere else in the world.

I've also lived all over the world. Here's a tiny sampling of places. Asia, North Africa, Canada, London, Paris.

Do you know what happens when someone collapses in serious distress on the street? People help. In all of those places.

Even in an incredibly impoverished place like, say, India or Sri Lanka — if someone collapsed on a street full of restaurants? People wouldn't ignore it. They'd help the person up. The restaurants would offer food and water. Ambulances would be called. The person would go to the hospital, where they obviously belong. The community would come together to solve the problem.

But in America, that seldom happens. It's a totally common and regular feature of American life to simply step over people who are collapsed in the street, to the point where I've seen it multiple times. It's much, much more abnormal for anyone to try to help. And so nobody did.

Let me continue my story.

All this flashed through my mind, and a black tide of anger rose in me. What the hell was wrong with Americans?

At that moment, my wife clutched my arm, noticing the man fallen on the street. She's a doctor. "Sweety," she said. "I know," I replied. She walked over to him, and began talking to him. "Are you OK?" She did her doctor talk with him. "I think he's dehydrated and distressed. He needs medical attention. He needs water. Why doesn't anyone give him some?! This street...it's full of restaurants!" she said in despair. "Call 911," I replied. She got on the phone.

Meanwhile, I offered the fallen man my croissant and some water. He took it, gratefully, and began wolfing it down, like he hadn't eaten in days. My heart broke a little.

A blonde man noticed us, and walked towards us. We began talking about the situation. He went into the cafe, and said he'd get the fallen man something to eat and some water. He returned, a minute later, with a cup of water, and a sandwich.
Then he said to me, angrily, "Do you know they didn't want to give that man any water? And that it's closing time, and they charged me for this sandwich? Even though I told them it's for the man collapsed outside their establishment, who's in an emergency? They're going to throw it out anyways."

I shook my head. He looked at me in disbelief. "America," he said, frowning in anger.

A fire truck showed up. A crew got out. My wife explained that she was a doctor in Europe, and she thought this man had heatstroke and needed medical attention. The chief of the crew assured us: "We'll take it from here."

The blonde man said to me: "I don't know what went wrong with this country. I've lived in multiple countries, and never seen this level of indifference anywhere else. How can these people just ignore...ignore a man dying on the street?"

I shook my head again. I could have told him so many things. About the time I was in third grade, and they made us watch a movie about a homeless person. I thought it was to teach empathy. I began to cry at what was a moving video. The other kids, egged on by the teachers, laughed at me. The Principal called my parents, concerned. What was wrong with their little boy? He was crying at school! Why was he showing some sign of human compassion and decency? He scolded my parents, and threatened to suspend me (I'm not kidding about any of this). They were shocked. Welcome to America.

I just replied to the blonde man, "I don't know what happened to Americans to make them like this, either. Like you said...this would never happen anywhere else."
"I know!" he replied forcefully, almost shouting. "It's not normal...to be able to ignore human suffering...like this." He struggled for the words.

We were a little relieved though, that at least the situation was being taken care of.
But we saw, to our shock, that the fire crew was leaving. They'd sternly warned the fallen man not to collapse in the street.

What the?

The man got up, as best he could, and began to stagger, like a zombie, down the sidewalk.

My God. At this point, the blonde man and I looked at each other in shock. My lovely wife was in disbelief. Nobody knew what to do.

We'd called the people who were supposed to take of the situation. And all they'd done was pass on the buck, and enforce property rights.

A thought went through my mind, one that often does. Human life had no worth to anyone in America. Who'd failed this man on the street? Who hadn't? This man had collapsed on a street full of restaurants and cafes, and nobody had even offered him a drink of water. The owners of all these establishments, everyone who worked in them — they could have cared less. They'd charged the blonde man for a sandwich to feed the fallen man — a sandwich they were going to throw out anyway.

The diners and revellers? They pointedly ignored the man in pain, dying on the street. They were capable of ignoring someone dying before their eyes, I thought to myself. What does that fit the definition of, though? A sociopath.

Were all these people sociopaths? Idiots? Monsters? Were Americans really what the world thought — so selfish, greedy, individualistic, ignorant, self-absorbed, that someone could die right in front of them for a lack of a glass of water...and they'd smile and party?

Now I had the answer to that question.

Yes.

Institutions, too, had failed this man. "Who should we call now?" my wife asked, bewildered. "I don't know," said the blond guy. "A homeless shelter?" I said. We looked up homeless shelters. There weren't any open in the summer in this town. The police didn't care. The hospitals didn't care. There was not a single institution that existed to take care of this situation: someone who was dying in front of our eyes for a lack of a glass of water.

"This is the richest country on earth," my wife shouted, furious. "Why are Americans like this? What's wrong with them?"

I shook my head again. What could anyone say?

"Americans are just bad people," the blonde man said, quietly.

I looked at the scene, sadly, and reflected on it.

Nobody had lifted a finger, to care for a man dying for a lack of a glass of water, on a street full of restaurants and cafes and bars in one of the richest towns in the richest country on earth. The establishments didn't care. The people in them were totally indifferent. Their patrons were capable of something monstrous, wrong, ugly, impossible: ignoring a man dying before their very eyes. No institution existed to solve this most simple and urgent of human problems.

What did that make Americans?

"How do you end up like this?" I asked. They knew what I meant. How do you end up capable of being so callous? What happened to Americans to shut down the empathy, humanity, and decency centres of their brains? After all, the scene before me — it was one that happened a thousand times a day or more in every city in the country. It seems a regular feature of American life to literally walk over someone, even if they were dying. No metaphor needed.

How do you end up like that? It's a real question, a serious one. We're all born with empathy, compassion, humanity. We have an inborn need to connect. We're social beings, relational at our core. Even a baby will cry when someone else is in distress — not ignore them. A baby is not capable of ignoring someone else's pain. Even my wonderful doggy is not capable of ignoring someone in pain. But Americans are —and it seems they pride themselves on it.

Something has taught them to be callous, unemotional. Something has made them inhuman. What is that something? Everyone has their own answer. For some people, it's the residue of slavery. For others, it's capitalism. Still others will say consumerism. There are shades of truth in all those answers, I think. And yet are any of them sufficient? Can any answer really be sufficient for the question: how can people be so callous they don't care about someone dying in front of them for a lack of a glass of water?

How does a human being end up that way? You see, this story wasn't about the collapsed man. Not really. It was about America. Americans. I'd seen people collapse around the globe. Happens every day. I'd seen it in Delhi, Karachi, Cairo, Colombo, Paris, London, Berlin. In every single one of those places — every single one — it was treated as the social emergency it was. Nobody ignored it. The person who was in pain was offered food, water, help, money, aid. Ultimately, they were taken care of, in a hospital or clinic or shelter.

Only in America — only in America — did literally nobody care.

And, worse, it was OK for nobody to care. That's the real point. Maybe you have a story where a community pulled together to help someone on the street in America. The point is not that this is the only outcome that ever happens in America. The point is that it happens so often because it's okay to not care in America, in a way that isn't true really anywhere else.

Only in America do these norms of cruelty and rage and indifference and hate exist. Isn't it hate, after all, to simply ignore someone who's dying right before you, for a lack of something incredibly basic, like water? Is it even a form of manslaughter? At the very least, it's negligent to an extreme. These perverse norms of extreme cruelty and indifference don't exist anywhere else in the world — even much, much poorer places, people offer more of what little they have to help. America's obscenity and ugliness are completely and totally unique.

That's a harsh paragraph, but I mean it. I really want you to think about it. If poor people in, say Delhi or Colombo would offer food and water and money to a person collapsed on the street and literally dying before their eyes...why don't Americans? Why can't Americans? I mean that in the imperative sense: Americans don't seem capable of acting like normal human beings. Their cruelty and selfishness and individualism and indifference are so cartoonishly extreme now that nobody else in the world even remotely comes close.

Like I said, I've seen this scene play out countless times in America. But it has never, ever happened to me anywhere else in the world. That is because, by and large, it doesn't happen elsewhere. People care about one another. Even people with far less than Americans. Asians, Africans. Canadians and Europeans, too, would be horrified to think that nobody helped someone dying on the street right before their eyes. Imagine such a thing taking place in Paris or Montreal. It doesn't.

It only happens in America because only American are capable of such indifference. I know I've said that, but I want to ask: what does that make them? What do we call a person who's literally so brain-dead, so damaged, they can ignore a person dying for a lack of a glass of water, and go on eating, laughing, partying, jogging? Such people have to be profoundly deficient in basic traits, like empathy, grace, reason, compassion. They have to think human life is worthless. They have to be incapable of relationality and sociality. They have to be damaged in deep and incredibly disturbing ways — they are behaving, after all, like inmates at maximum security prisons, like concentration camp guards, like death squads, who are the only other people I can think of capable of ignoring profound human suffering, and laughing.

It isn't normal to be this way. You have to seriously damaged as a human being to act the bizarre, abnormal, callous, cruel, emotionally stunted, psychologically, morally, and ethically deficient way Americans are capable of always do. To take selfies and pose on instagram and trade stocks from your phone and Snapchat your friends while someone literally dies of thirst in front of you.

It happens every day in America. It's happened more times than I can count, to me. Where else does it really happen? Nowhere. Canadians and Europeans and Asians and Africans are not capable of acting this way, except maybe in times of war. But in times of peace, normal times? They don't act in such abnormal, bizarre, obscene ugly ways. They have not lost their humanity.

It seems like Americans have, though. Something has gone deeply, badly wrong with them. In the head, in the mind, in the spirit, in the soul. Americans don't care about anything, it seems to me. They're incapable of behaving like decent humans, most of the time, and worse, capable of behaving like monsters all of the time. Even the good ones.

My liberal town. I wonder about it now. What is it really made of? Hate and fear and greed? Stupidity and ignorance and self-absorption? How could all these people who think of themselves as good not offer a fallen man a glass of water?

"Thanks, I guess, for what you did," the blonde man said, lost for words a little.

"Hey, man, thank you, too," I replied.

The man who'd collapsed staggered down the street, one slow, uncertain step a a time, clutching his garbage bags. We'd given him food and water, a little money. What else could we do? But how long would he last?

My wife shuddered.

The rest went on laughing, stuffing their faces, gorging themselves, laughing at Instagram, football, television, the porn their lives were made of.

I felt the black tide of anger that had risen in me become a whirlwind. Who were these people? I wasn't made for the kind of ugliness and depravity Americans were OK with. The collapsed man clutched his garbage bags. But it seemed to me that the real garbage here wasn't in those bags. It was in the heads and hearts and minds of all those people in my little liberal town who were somehow OK with a man dying of thirst, before their very eyes.

I turned around, at last, along in my disgust, almost weeping with rage, and walked away.

Umair
August 2021

[Eddie Teach]

Cool story bro.

Honestly, fuck this guy.

[Jacob]

There are a large number of Americans who are kind, empathetic, generous, and wonderful in all manner of ways. But there is also a strain in American culture that seems to have elevated callousness and cruelty to a virtue.

Whether the proportion of good traits to awful ones is particularly skewed compared to previous eras or other cultures I cannot say. But the shittiness of those Americans who are shitty is certainly well highlighted.

[HVC]

I don't know if it's an American thing or a big city thing. Contrary to the mans assertion I know those would happen in Toronto. Hell I've seen it happen in Toronto.

[Grey Fox]

Yes.

*Waves at languish*

[Syt]

There are a large number of Americans who are kind, empathetic, generous, and wonderful in all manner of ways. But there is also a strain in American culture that seems to have elevated callousness and cruelty to a virtue.

I don't know if it's callousness as something else. I feel there's a strong streak of personalizing guilt for failure. If you poor, if you're homeless, it's your fault, because America gives you all opportunities you need to succeed. If you're not willing or able to work yourself to the bone to pay for a roof over your head and a TV dinner  then you deserve no help or sympathy. Of course that sentiment is not homogeneous through Americans.

Nor is it unique to the USA. In Austria there's a debate how unemployed can be incentivized to take tough jobs with shitty hours and shittier pay that remain unfilled. The focus is entirely on putting the hurt on the unemployed (Austria already has one of the lowest paying unemployment schemes in the EU) and not on the employers paying more.

[crazy canuck]

The belief that one needs to cut benefits to drive people to work goes hand in hand with creating the kind of society where this happens.  Not unique to Americans.  but I think the rest of the world is recovering for the right wing trickle down lunacy that gripped us all for a couple of decades.

[Admiral Yi]

My read is the homeless dude has been running this scam for a while.

[garbon]

I'm not sure what to take from that anecdote.

[The Brain]

I've also lived all over the world. Here's a tiny sampling of places. Asia, North Africa, Canada, London, Paris.

Some places are more equal than others.

[alfred russel]

I've also lived all over the world. Here's a tiny sampling of places. Asia, North Africa, Canada, London, Paris.

Do you know what happens when someone collapses in serious distress on the street? People help. In all of those places.

Even in an incredibly impoverished place like, say, India or Sri Lanka — if someone collapsed on a street full of restaurants? People wouldn't ignore it. They'd help the person up. The restaurants would offer food and water. Ambulances would be called. The person would go to the hospital, where they obviously belong. The community would come together to solve the problem.

I don't think that is true at all. There is a lot of callousness toward the far too many homeless on the streets in America, but a place like India can still be shocking to America.

In any case a lot of reluctance I have to help homeless people is they almost always turn out to be unstable and every encounter overwhelmingly negative. One most recent incident was with a guy riding the metro (likely all day to stay out of the elements) and he struck up conversation on my way back to the airport. I guess because someone engaged him in conversation he got excited and came to sit beside me, and ended up spitting a bunch of food up on me and then felt bad and started trying to clean me up (which not only didn't work but he smelled like a sewer and probably hadn't bathed in forever). Homelessness in America is just a massive untreated mental health catastrophe.

[chipwich]

You don't have consent to interfere in the hobo's meltdown.

[Josquius]

They say only in America but sounds fairly typical of the UK too.
I know in China people also tend to actively avoid getting involved in stuff like this for fear of being made liable and sued.

Were all these people sociopaths? Idiots? Monsters? Were Americans really what the world thought — so selfish, greedy, individualistic, ignorant, self-absorbed, that someone could die right in front of them for a lack of a glass of water...and they'd smile and party?

They missed some-paranoid, distrusting, cynical.
I think these are more likely.
IMO it's not that people are callous to someone dying on the street... It's more they don't believe it. They think it's some kind of scam. It's a trap.

Rather than a little story about people not caring for a homeless guy I was expecting an article looking at things on a bigger scale and the insanity taking hold with a large chunk of the country. These days people are increasingly self centred and have zero trust in other people to the extent any random idiot thinks they know more than experts.

[grumbler]

I'm not sure what to take from that anecdote.

Take from it that some people love to exaggerate, and then share their exaggerations as truths.  MAGAts, for instance.  This writer, for another.

[The Brain]

I don't think Americans are terrible people. Some of my best acquaintances are Americans.