I remember sitting in Sunday School while my mother (the Sunday School teacher) and some helpers used her extensive array of puppets to act out Bible stories to squeals of delight from dozens of children. They told a hilarious rendition of the lost sheep and used a scraggly-looking fox named Sheldon to play the part of a hungry lion. They told us the tale of Gideon and his struggles with faith, David and Goliath (again, starring Sheldon as a furry Goliath), Noah’s ark, and many more. But a favorite of everyone’s was always the tale of the Good Samaritan.
If you didn’t have a talented and creative Sunday School teacher/mom, YouTube can recap it for you:
The TLDR version: Guy gets beat up on the road and, instead of helping him, a priest and a Levite ignore him and continue on with their day. But when a Samaritan came around (a man who was hated by Jews), he stopped and helped the man and took him to an inn. Jesus told his followers that this is the basis of the law: love your neighbor as yourself.
This actually happened to George Clooney — except that no one, not even a Samaritan, helped him. Clooney sat down with Jonathan Dean of The Sunday Times for an exclusive interview and ended up disclosing a traumatic motorcycle accident where he was lying on the road, maybe dying, while people gathered around to film him for social media. This is worse than any horror story Stephen King could dream up.
Three years ago George Clooney was in a motorbike crash that could have killed him. “I was waiting for my switch to turn off,” he says. He was in Sardinia, going at 75mph, when a car turned in front of him and he flew over the handlebars. Groggy, lying on the ground and screaming, he realised a crowd was gathering — he was being filmed by people on their phones…
“If you’re in the public eye,” he says, “what you realise when you’re on the ground thinking it’s the last minute of your life is that, for some people, it’s just going to be entertainment for their Facebook page. I’m a pretty positive guy, but that told me — clearly — that you really are here just for their entertainment.”
Lamenting an age when some people’s first thoughts on seeing an injured man is to shoot them for social media “likes”, he adds: “You want to take every one and shake them!”
I don’t want to shake them. I want to put them in prison. It’s way past time for laws to catch up with the mental disorder that social media has given everyone. People who choose to film crimes in progress or people being injured instead of calling for help or intervening to help should be prosecuted. Period.
I’m not sure that Clooney is right that this happened to him simply because he’s a public figure. If he was wearing a helmet then no one would have recognized him. People do this to everyone, not just movie stars. How many viral videos have you seen of people you don’t know being beaten up while others just film? I’ve seen thousands and it makes me sick.
Just recently, a woman was raped on a train in Philadelphia while at least two people stood by and filmed. The official narrative first said that there was a crowd of bystanders doing nothing and then it changed to, oh well, it was only two and they tried to alert someone. Did they though? Frankly, I don’t believe the reworking of this story into “it’s not as bad as we said it was” when there is surveillance footage of a woman being raped and two people holding their phones up filming. Two is enough. No one intervened.
Surveillance video from the train revealed two passengers raised their phones toward the assault, and that one of those provided their video to authorities, AP said.
The prosecutor went out of his way to excuse the passengers who ignored a 40-minute assault. Why didn’t someone stop the attacker from harassing this woman before she was raped? None of these people deserve any kind of quarter. They should be prosecuted.
While Ngoy’s alleged interactions with the victim took place over a 40-minute period, starting with unwanted talking and then groping, the rape lasted about six minutes. Other riders were not on the train for the entire duration of their interaction, and might not have known what was happening, Stollsteimer said.
And so should the people who crowded around Clooney while he thought he might be taking his last breaths on earth as they filmed it. People are obviously not going to police themselves when it comes to helping their neighbor, and so the long arm of the law must intervene and set up real consequences—jail time—for anyone who chooses to film an assault instead of calling for help. That thing you’re holding can call 911. Use it.
We’re all living inside an episode of Black Mirror (“White Bear” to be exact) and very few people are noticing. Is this the future you want? Because this is where we are now. God help us.