Any given Friday

To come to the CS department I should walk around 10 minutes from my place. Usually I do it while hearing some music. That's the usual routine. This morning something different occurred. While walking on Via San Donato I saw a guy running very fast in the opposite direction I was walking. I also managed to see some other guys that were chasing him. The running guy passed along my side and I saw his face; he had something in his hands. The first thing I thought was "in Colombia this running guy would be a thief for sure; these guys must be fooling around, perhaps some stupid Laurea celebration."

Some seconds after that I realized the running guys were actually cops and that the guy that passed by my side was indeed a thief. I then looked back and the thief was stopped by some persons that, unlike me, were clever enough to recognize the situation and to do something about it.

Given my TV corrupted mind, the next things I thought were related to Spiderman and Seinfeld. As you might recall, in Spiderman there's a scene in which Peter lets a thief to run away, disappointed by the fact he didn't receive some money he gained in a fight. The running thief would end up killing uncle Ben. Also, in a Seinfeld episode, the four main characters end up in jail because they did nothing when a fat guy was being attacked and robbed. They were arrested because they didn't obey the "Good Samaritan law". The trial derived from this offense is part of the end of the ninth (and last) season.

Then I thought about my indifference. I have always believed that as Colombians we're endowed with a dose of indifference with respect others that's way higher than for other people. We immune to the other's suffer, so to speak. Everyday lots of Colombians lose their legs, liberty or lives and no one reacts. We keep thinking everything is OK, until something occurs in our home. We usually do nothing (when we could do a lot) and try to find excuses to not feel bad. For instance, when someone is assassinated, the most common reaction is "oh, too bad, but I am sure he deserved it somehow".

Since I am now in a society that's a bit more aware in this kind of situations (but not too much), I expected some sort of spontaneous reaction against me, given that I had all the chances to stop the guy and I did absolutely nothing. I don't know, I expected perhaps some old guy yelling at me in dialect, or some cute yet not so young lady looking at me like crap, with a disappointed expression (as it occurred to Peter in Spiderman). More seriously, I was afraid of some reaction from those cops that were running at a more slower pace and that could see me doing nothing to stop the thief (something like in Seinfeld). Yes, I felt guilty indeed, and did the two things anyone (?) would have done: (i) I walked faster so to abandon the "crime scene" as soon as possible (to reduce the chance of spontaneous reactions), and (ii) started to invent things to justify my indifference: "I was distracted", "I am a PhD student, I worked till late and was hardly awake", "I am a foreigner", and stuff like that.

Some questions to conclude: Would the fact that I did nothing play against me in an eventual future, as it occurred to Peter Parker? And more importantly, is indifference towards the others something one can overcome by living in a different environment, or is it something that's just coded in my Colombian genes?