Fear The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: The best and worst in us
By Liam O'Leary
The Worst In Us #2: Indifference in the face of others’ suffering.
As the battle raged between Alicia, Strand, Luciana, and The Vultures, Morgan attempted to get Althea to help him and Naomi take John to safety.
Her response?
“I’m not part of this story.”
While indifference to the plight of other people’s suffering is, sadly, not uncommon, it can be so much worse in a zombie apocalypse. Our somewhat natural instinct to not want to get involved in the affairs of strangers can mean that people can die awful, sometimes avoidable, deaths, because we chose not to act.
To be honest, I don’t blame Althea for not wanting to get involved in the battle. To the best of her knowledge, The Vultures were assholes, and she got along well enough with Alicia, Nick (while he was alive), Strand, and Luciana, so, not getting mixed up in their business made sense.
However, Althea almost deciding to just let John die under the auspices of “Not being part of the story” is a whole other matter.
Objectivity and neutrality are important in journalism, but, that doesn’t mean you can’t help someone who’s been injured. If we have the power to help someone (So long as they’re not like Simon) shouldn’t we?
Shouldn’t we help people if we have the means to do it, rather than just sitting on the sidelines and letting them die?
The larger problem with that indifference is that, over time, it can make us lose our empathy. Without our empathy, we lose our ability to relate to other people. Eventually, we may go from simply not helping people to actively putting them in harm’s way — Not out of malice, but, simply because we want something they have, and putting them in danger is the quickest and easiest way to get what we want.
As bad as someone who flies into a violent explosive rage may be, the person who lets or even causes people to die out of sheer lack of empathy, might just be worse.