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Reply #29: The headline is misleading, and what's 'below the fold' suggests a more complicated picture. [View All]

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29. The headline is misleading, and what's 'below the fold' suggests a more complicated picture.
I think anyone who knows me will vouch for the fact that I am willing to believe any evil of corporate capitalism. However, I would point out that the piece appears to be sensationalizing this event as much as it possibly can, and distorting it in the process. Because:

1) Vince, the person who died, did not die "at Target." He collapsed at Target and died at the hospital. The distinction matters, since ignoring someone who is sick is different from ignoring an actual corpse (though it's debatable which is worse).

2) As for "Where was the good Samaritan side of people?", the article does mention that a nurse and a paramedic who were there shopping saw Vince in trouble and tried to administer CPR. I would submit that this is the good Samaritan side of people in action. First of all, it'd be quite the coincidence if Vince just happened to be near two people professionally trained to respond to medical emergencies when he collapsed. It seems more likely to me that someone who *was* near him saw him collapse and alerted enough people to the situation that the nurse and paramedic found out about it and came over to help. Second, once the nurse and paramedic were helping him, then it wouldn't have been useful for the other shoppers to hang around watching; that would just mean the ambulance EMTs had to fight through a crowd to get to him. The way the piece is written, you don't know how much of this walking around Vince's body happened before the two good Samaritans got there and how much of it happened after; so you don't know how many of these holiday shoppers were in fact callously ignoring a human being in trouble and how many of them were going about their business after verifying that people more qualified than themselves were taking care of him. Either way, obviously there were *some* people in that store who noticed Vince and did their best to help him.

All this says nothing about the irresponsibility of deliberately promoting mass frenzy for the purpose of selling more crap to people who generally don't need it and often can't afford it--which is something I will deplore as vehemently as anyone else you can find. But I don't think it does us any good to be told that human nature is *worse* than it actually is--which is what this piece seems to me to be doing.

The Plaid Adder
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