Letting a Blind Man Fall: Thoughts on Responsibility

I just finished Erik Reece’s essay, “In the Presence of Rock and Sky” in the April issue of The Sun magazine. Reece is a writer and environmental advocate who has written about strip mining in the Appalachians, and in this essay he shares his experience of climbing Mount Fanaraken in Norway, the country of his ancestors. In the essay, Reece explores Norwegian cultural perspectives, extolling Norwegian virtues of modesty, humility, and environmental stewardship and the philosophy of Norway’s Arne Naess and his deep ecology movement.

When he contrasts Norwegian values with the atrophy of empathy in our culture, he shares this personal story:

“One morning a few years ago, on a visit to New York City, I was trying to navigate the subway when a train approached my platform. A throng of businesspeople rushed from it, and in that mad dash someone’s careless foot came down on the slender white cane of a blind man, breaking it. He fell to the concrete and reached furiously around for the remnants of his shattered cane. No one, including me, stopped to help him. ‘Do I have all the pieces?’ he cried out. Bystanders showed no sign of listening. I stood there, paralyzed. Why didn’t I do something? Why didn’t anybody else? Had we all inoculated ourselves against such daily pathos? Would I be embarrassed in front of these New Yorkers, to be seen helping this man – embarrassed by my empathy? Finally a man in a yarmulke stooped to gather up the scattered sections of the blind man’s cane, then helped him up the stairs to the street. And that simple act stung me with a shame I carried for days.”

When I read this paragraph I was stunned on so many levels. First of all, I grew up in New York City, and New Yorkers are not, despite our reputations, callous, unfriendly, unhelpful people. I’ve certainly helped many people in New York, and have been the recipient of many kindnesses as well. Nor is “daily pathos” all that common these days in New York. It is unusual to see anyone fall down, let alone a blind man whose cane has just been shattered. Sure, there are nasty New Yorkers, and sure the “bystander effect,” in which the likelihood of helping another declines as the number of witnesses rises, but it is astounding to me that Reece observed so fully the details of this blind man’s fall, from the stepping on the cane, to his cries for help, to the lack of response, to the final denouement when Reece watches a man in a yarmulke lead the blind man up the stairs and to the street and still did nothing. Apparently, he was not among those rushing to get on the subway himself or he would not have been able to observe all this and in such great detail. No, he just watched. And then felt a shame he “carried for days.”

It’s hard for me to imagine someone carrying such shame for only days. I like to think that a person who did nothing as a blind man fell before their eyes after his cane had been broken by a careless passerby (whether or not he cried for help) would feel shame far longer than that. I like to think that, like Reece, they would seek to understand their lack of response and wonder about the ways in which their culture molded them into a person who fails to help another in distress, but I would hope that they wouldn’t generalize to the degree Reece did, elevating Norway and decrying a cultural lack of empathy and simply stop there. After all, the bystander effect, in full force in Reece’s subway story, could happen in Oslo, too. Even in his essay, Reece shares the response of a Norwegian man (with whom he does some U.S.-bashing) to Norway’s low crime rate noting that in Norway, “We don’t have that many people here. If we had as many people as you do in America, we’d have a lot of crazies, too.”

So, while I appreciate the humility that it took to share his story about the fallen blind man, I worry about stereotyping Americans as lacking empathy. I think there is another lesson here, one Reece neglected to explore. When we blame our culture for our behavior, we implicitly fail to take responsibility for ourselves and our choices. America is filled with extraordinary, compassionate, and heroic people, working diligently every day to right wrongs and create a sustainable, peaceful, and just world. I know many such people, and what they have in common is a refusal to shirk their responsibility for themselves, other people and other species, and for a restored and just world. Frankly, I cannot imagine any of them neglecting the blind man fallen on the subway platform.

I hope that Reece will carry the shame he experienced in New York forever, not in a burdensome and destructive way, but rather in a powerfully instructive way that reminds him that he is indeed responsible for his choices, and if he chooses to embrace that responsibility, he may yet cultivate in his readers and his fellow Americans the qualities he admires so much in Norwegians.

Zoe Weil
Author of Most Good, Least Harm and Above All, Be Kind

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