DOES the shocking death of Wal-Mart worker Jdimytai Damour in his Long Island store prove that American society has abandoned all decency?
We’ve seen this before, some will say – look at the crush at a 1979 WHO concert, which killed 11, or at Kitty Genovese, stabbed to death near her Kew Gardens home as neighbors did nothing in 1964.
But in 2007, the official journal of the American Psychological Association called the Genovese story a myth grown from inaccurate newspaper coverage. The authors found that her neighbors likely didn’t hear her screams. The deaths at the Who concert are more like stampedes at soccer matches fueled by alchohol or drugs.
Not so during a morning shopping spree.
What happened at Wal-Mart is more like this year’s Hartford, Conn., incident – where onlookers walked by and failed to offer help to a 78-year-old man who had been struck by a car. (It was caught on video, so there is no doubt that it happened.)
Forensic psychiatrist Keith Ablow says something is happening in our culture that has led to less empathy. He dismisses the idea that such behavior has always been around, saying he has noticed a major difference in the pathologies of his patients now, versus when he started his practice.
“When I remind people that they are not TV personalities, that is not something I was doing 15 years ago,” he says. “They seem to have a new ability to slip away from their real-life concerns. They remake themselves in their own minds according to a more fictional story. They borrow characters from TV dramas. They allow themselves degrees of freedom in terms of being less honest.”
Where are they learning this?
No surprise: the media and video games, mixed in with coddling and reinforcement from their parents. (It was, after all, mostly parents trampling over people at that Wal-Mart.)
Over Thanksgiving, a wise friend told me that, while he worries about his kids seeing sex and violence on TV, he spends more time shielding them from shows that display rudeness or indifference toward others.
I suppose the TV isn’t on very much in his house.
Incivility isn’t just accepted these days – from celebrity news to TV shows – it’s glorified.
Last week, the Oxygen Network debuted the third season of “The Bad Girls Club” – like seemingly all reality shows, a toxic celebration of rude, mentally unbalanced people shrieking at each other.
Oxygen’s Web site features a section hailing these “Destructive Divas”: “From home break-ins to club toss-outs, these girls are bad. The girls get kicked out of three clubs – all in the premier episode!”
The show is the most-watched Oxygen original series ever.
One “bad girl” brags on the premiere: “I like to push people’s buttons. I have jealousy issues, I’m very rude, conniving, and opinionated . . . I’m just a bad person to know. If someone was picking on me because I was, like, a cute blonde girl, my first instinct would be to tell them they are ugly.”
I would plow over someone at a Wal-Mart to get my hands on discounted lip gloss.
P.M. Forni co-founded the Johns Hopkins Civility Project in 1997, and has rung the alarm bells on the collapse of civility. While Americans still have manners, he says, we’ve lost “the manners of past generations.”
Big deal, some will say – those “manners” are just outdated customs. No, Forni argues in his book “Choosing Civility”: They’re the glue that holds society together.
Civility, he notes, requires restraint and putting other people’s needs before yours. His studies have found that people who view and treat their fellow citizens with respect are also more successful, have stronger social bonds and better mental health.
And they don’t trample people on their way to buy a plasma TV.
kirstenpowers@aol.com