Road accidents: Why people just watch victims dying

This is a daily occurrence.

A mother and daughter were run over by a truck last September 12.  The 9-year-old girl had her head totally smashed and died on the spot while the young woman was grimacing in pain, crying for help under the six-wheeler van near corner of Bayan-bayanan and Molave sts. in Marikina.  People and traffic officers were reportedly just watching and nobody bothered to bring them to the nearby few meters away “private medical center” until an ambulance from a government hospital arrived.

There were a number of similar incidents I have personally witnessed driving on the road but always the same sad and baffling drama would lead me to ask: “Why are they so heartless just watching victims dying?” Thus in each case, I couldn’t bear the sight so I had to take charge bringing the bloodied victims to nearest hospitals especially when traffic is too heavy for a rescue team to arrive in less than 30 minutes. 

Had it not ever occur in these people’s imagination if their mother, daughter or any member of their immediate family were the victims? Would these bystanders just watch and do nothing until their loved ones breathe their last? What a chronic social malady this is which persist to cause otherwise avoidable deaths in the streets.

How many lives of the hapless, helpless souls who figured in vehicular accidents could have been saved had it not for our deep-seated “collective apathy” or if not for the damaging “school of thought” being propagated by medical “experts” that no one should be allowed to touch the victim or victims except the paramedics who are trained to “handle” the situation?  But if the latter should indeed be the case, why don’t government and medical professionals train policemen, traffic officers and barangay personnel to do the job since they are the ones who can readily be at the scene of accidents in five minutes? 

How tragic that simple arithmetic is the answer to some of the “life and death” questions in this “progressive” world we live in.

--Reni M. Valenzuela, Quezon City