The (lack of) Good Samaritans.

            The controversy of the 2 year-old Wang Yueyue who died in China Friday has been all over the media. The Chinese toddler wandered outside unbeknownst to her parents and was twice run over by vans, and stepped over by 18 different people walking or biking by. No one stopped to help the hurt and bleeding little girl until finally a garbage man picked her up and alerted her mother.  

            In China, the law is heavily influenced on the idea of only guilty people have responsible actions or do seemingly good things. For instance, a young man, named Peng Yu, helped a woman who had fallen on the sidewalk and then escorted her to the hospital and paid her initial hospital entrance fee in order to have her receive help. After the fact, the old woman accused him of tripping her; therefore suing him, and in court the judge ruled that “Mr. Peng should pay the [rest of the] woman’s medical bills because if he had not been responsible for her injuries he would not have taken her to hospital (csmonitor.com)”. Because of this Yan Yunxiang, a UCLA professor studying the Chinese Good Samaritan phenomenon, says that “in today’s world it is both unwise and unsafe to help a stranger in a public place”, because of the fact that Chinese law has no law that protects these “Good Samaritans” from the people they help turning around and suing them (csmonitor.com). This is extremely interesting, because in most European countries, there is in fact a law that says it is a crime not to help someone in serious distress.

            In today’s society there is definitely a common notion that “self is #1”,  is this what’s starting to effect everyday interactions, the economy and jobs, and even life-threatening situations like this? How easy is it to walk over something horrible as opposed to taking a second and helping; and how can you when the world is based on alternate ideas and you know you will pay a price?