A Society Paralyzed by the Presence of Evil

This week, most Americans were shocked by the images of Decarlos Brown Jr., a violent schizophrenic with a 14-count rap sheet, stabbing a young Ukrainian refugee, Iryna Zarutska, to death on a Charlotte, North Carolina, light-rail commuter train.

The video of the incident is absolutely horrifying: Brown, clad in a red hoodie, sits behind Zarutska; then, he rises, removing a knife from his pocket; he quickly leans forward and plunges the knife into Zarutska’s jugular vein repeatedly and then calmly walks away, blood dripping from the murder weapon; Zarutska, stunned and confused and terrified and in shock, raises her hands to her face and cries; she then gradually slumps over onto the floor, where her blood leaks into a pool at the door of the car; five people in the camera shot do absolutely nothing, as do many others in the carriage. As Zarutska bleeds out, nobody moves to help her for one minute and 35 seconds.

Certain incidents in American life prompt serious change.

This should be one of them.

First, the media. The incident happened on Aug. 22 but only broke into the news two weeks later—and even then, only became a subject of public furor thanks to the presence of social media: not a single legacy media outlet reported the story. It is obviously true that had the victim been black and the perpetrator white, the media would have turned the murder into the basis for yet another racial pseudo-reckoning over America’s supposed white supremacy.

This incident remained anonymous for weeks because the legacy media believes that covering black-on-white violent crime—which is, statistically, far more common on a Per-capita basis than the opposite—somehow evidences racism. The opposite is true: Treating violent crime as a symptom of racial injustice is itself truly racist. Decarlos Brown did not murder Iryna Zarutska because of America’s history of racial injustice—and it does nothing but perpetuate racial injustice to suggest that he did. It wrongly suggests the inevitability of black-on-white crime and shifts guilt from criminals to the innocent.

In truth, violent crime in America has little to do with racism and everything to do with how our society coddles criminals and abandons the mentally ill. Brown was allowed to walk free because of the pathetic viewpoint, expressed originally by the mayor of Charlotte, that “We will never arrest our way out of issues such as homelessness and mental health.” But, of course, we can involuntarily commit our way out of violent schizophrenics threatening law-abiding citizens with deadly weapons, and we can ensure that repeat offenders spend the rest of their lives away from those law-abiding citizens. Only the misplaced empathy of the suicidal allows monsters like Brown to walk free.

And then, finally, there is the issue of the bystanders. In 1964, 28-year-old bartender Kitty Genovese was raped and stabbed to death outside her apartment building in Queens; The New York Times reported that 37 witnesses observed or heard what had happened and did virtually nothing. While that reporting was exaggerated, it led to serious research on the so-called “bystander effect,” the phenomenon whereby people tend to stand by and do nothing about acts of evil when in the presence of others.

Perhaps that can help explain why nobody did anything about Brown’s violent actions, but it doesn’t explain why nobody tried to help Zarutska as she bled out. Instead, the attitude of most in the car seemed to be “mind my own business.” Many of those onboard simply kept scrolling on their phones.

And herein lies perhaps the deepest problem with American society as a whole: Many Americans are so alienated from each another that the simple sight of a young woman bleeding to death doesn’t draw action. And that is a soul-sickness.

When, on the tape, one young black man rushes to help Zarutska, removing his shirt to try to stanch the bleeding, it’s a reminder that all of us can and should act in the face of evil—and that, in the absence of a state ready to protect its citizens, we must be prepared at all times. If the Zarutska slaying means anything, it means this: From the state level to the individual level, it’s time to come together to stop predators and protect the innocent.

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