Apathy

This poem began with research into the bystander effect — the psychological phenomenon in which individuals are less likely to intervene in an emergency as the number of witnesses grows. What struck me was not the apathy the name implies, but its opposite: that bystanders are almost never indifferent. They are frozen, torn, overwhelmed. The title is ironic by design.

The word freezing appears twice. The first time it belongs to a figure down the tunnel — victim, perhaps, or another bystander, or both. The second time it belongs to the speaker. The repetition is the argument: the same paralysis that afflicts the person in distress afflicts everyone watching. Victim, bystander, speaker, and reader collapse into a single condition.

Research distinguishes between two kinds of empathic response: sympathy, which is other-oriented, and personal distress, which is self-oriented. Paradoxically, it is those who feel most acutely — those in great distress at the sight of suffering — who are most likely to freeze when a crowd is present. Caring is not enough. The crowd moves in, and freezing becomes contagious.