Someone needed to speak up thusly, “yo, he’s going to die if you don’t stop choking him; does this person deserve to die because he’s having a mental breakdown?”
Which would totally change the feeling in the subway car, from thinking of the person being choked as a disturber of the peace inconveniencing and perhaps possibly scaring a few people, to a human being with mental health problems having a bad day but basically not going to harm anybody.
I mean, one person speaking up could have engendered the requisite feeling of compassion and empathy that situation should have taken.
And that poor guy would be alive today and (hopefully) getting treatment, while at the same time the crowd could have shamed and stopped the vigilante asshole for wanting to act out his fascist fantasy.
I imagine people who would want to intervene would be terrified that the mob would immediately turn on them. The planetary average person is 5'6", 38 years old, and weighs 137 pounds. Fighting is hard, both physically and especially psychologically. Most people have trouble making phone calls. Exploding in to lethal violence in an unclear situation is several orders of magnitude harder than that, and as good as impossible if you have no experience with combat.
I've intervened in some pretty terrifying situations. I weigh literally twice as much as the average person and I'm almost a foot taller than them. And I absolutely understand why the average person does not throw themselves in to situations like this.
![[CW: death] It's cool that the media's moral panics over crime and homelessness is straight up getting people murdered](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/v2CQbAitDu.jpg){kind=link}
Nobody intervened because then they'd be next.
That’s bullshit.
Someone needed to speak up thusly, “yo, he’s going to die if you don’t stop choking him; does this person deserve to die because he’s having a mental breakdown?”
Which would totally change the feeling in the subway car, from thinking of the person being choked as a disturber of the peace inconveniencing and perhaps possibly scaring a few people, to a human being with mental health problems having a bad day but basically not going to harm anybody.
I mean, one person speaking up could have engendered the requisite feeling of compassion and empathy that situation should have taken.
And that poor guy would be alive today and (hopefully) getting treatment, while at the same time the crowd could have shamed and stopped the vigilante asshole for wanting to act out his fascist fantasy.
I imagine people who would want to intervene would be terrified that the mob would immediately turn on them. The planetary average person is 5'6", 38 years old, and weighs 137 pounds. Fighting is hard, both physically and especially psychologically. Most people have trouble making phone calls. Exploding in to lethal violence in an unclear situation is several orders of magnitude harder than that, and as good as impossible if you have no experience with combat.
I've intervened in some pretty terrifying situations. I weigh literally twice as much as the average person and I'm almost a foot taller than them. And I absolutely understand why the average person does not throw themselves in to situations like this.