See Something, Say Nothing

See Something, Say Nothing

            When I was attending high school, for four years I would follow the same exact schedule when it came to catching the bus to be able to make it on time.  My mornings went something like this:

 6:15- Wake up

6:55- Walk out the house

6:58- Get on the Bx21

7:17- Get on the Bx19;  

And at 7:17am is when the madness begun.  Every day that I took the Bx19 bus from Third Ave. in the Bronx to 145^th street and 7^th Ave. in Harlem, there would be the same family that took the same exact bus and got off the same exact stop as me.  This family consisted of a mother, a younger daughter, I would say about age 11, and two younger brothers; one most likely about 9 and the other 5.  The older boy and the daughter were both hyper would not sit down on the bus.  “Pretty early to be eating candy” I always thought but hey, to each its own.  As I’m sitting there just thinking that these kids should not be this hyper at 7am the older boy starts to bully the younger boy, who was actually the only calm one.  Again, I think to myself, “sibling rivalry”, nothing out of the ordinary. My next few trips on the Bx19 I would see this family but what I presumed to be “sibling rivalry” was actually sibling abuse.  The older brother would literally beat his younger brother.  Hit him, kick him, bite him, a whole bunch of other things that I always tell people you have to have been there to see it.  While this happened the mom would literally just sit there, the little girl would be running around the bus and the younger brother would just sit there cry and say stop.  I always wondered why no one said anything to the mother about how she should control her kids. 

            

I witnessed this go on for a few months until one day it got so bad in the morning I decided to speak up.  I would tell the mother something along the lines of what is wrong with you?; why are you letting your son abuse your other son while he sits there and cry?.  I was arguing with the mother and then all of a sudden the same little boy that I was trying to protect then turned around and started screaming at me for arguing with his mother.  I knew that family was a lost cause from that moment.  I just turned away from them and kept walking in the direction I was supposed to go.  A man that was also on the bus came and told me, something I will never forget “I wanted to say something too, I was going to say something as soon as you said something, but you see how the little kids acted, sometimes it’s just best for you to mind your business and go about your day, everyone on this earth cannot be helped”.  Now let’s fast forward to my first semester at BCC; when I learned about the “Bystander effect” in my Psychology class.  According to Psychologytoday.com, The Bystander effect is when people are witnessing a crime but do not respond because they think “someone else watching will respond, or it is none of their business”.  I realized on them countless days on the Bx19, every passenger would be experiencing the bystander effect and the one day I decided to break the bystander effect unknowingly, it would be a wasted effort.  This is my experience from riding the Bx19 bus.

Work Cited

< "Bystander Effect." Psychology Today. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Feb. 2014. >