Opinion / Raymond Zhou
We still need sense of right and wrong
By Raymond Zhou (China Daily)
Updated: 2007-01-06 06:48
The New Year bells had hardly stopped tolling, when something outwardly
tragicomic but inherently disturbing happened in Chengdu, Sichuan.
On Tuesday morning, a young woman was contemplating jumping off a
six-story building. It took the police and firefighters five hours to
talk the emotional distressed her out of it and move her to safety.
But that made some people very unhappy some onlookers who had gathered on
the street to witness the crisis. According to press reports, many of
them "held out their necks as if they were ducks dangling from someone's
hands."
The mood was boisterously festive. Some yelled: "Come on! Jump!" Others
took out their cellphones and snapped pictures or called their friends,
asking them to "come and enjoy the spectacle". Still others were so
impatient that they complained: "She's just pretending. Why didn't she
jump before the police arrived?"
A young man joined in and effectively played the male lead of the revelry
by sitting on the window of an opposite building playing a guitar.
Everyone booed in disappointment when the woman was rescued.
One thing these people said was right. The woman did not want to kill
herself. Most suicide attempts are cries for help or attention. Migrant
workers who threaten to jump off high-rise buildings do it just to get
the wages owed to them. People jilted in love usually go through a
difficult time of loss and reconciliation. They are not determined to
die, but are vulnerable nonetheless.
It was, therefore, terrible for the crowd to act the way they did. Are
their lives so pathetically uneventful that they had to witness a
possible suicide for pleasure? Wouldn't they feel guilty if she had
really jumped? What if she were someone they knew a friend, a family
member or simply an acquaintance? I wouldn't say these people were
bloodthirsty, but their minds were somewhat twisted. Worse yet, their
behavior did suggest something bigger, something about us as a people who
have broken out of moral shackles of one kind but have yet to find a new
code of ethics.
The incident inevitably reminds one of an episode in one of Lu Xun's
stories: A young man was being executed for his involvement in
revolutionary activities. A big crowd looked on with nothing but
indifference and curiosity on their faces.
The great Chinese writer got inspiration from newsreels he saw when he
was a medical student in Japan. He was ashamed that his own compatriots
could be so insensitive. That gave him a jolt that the Chinese people
needed a writer who would shake them out of their stupor more than a
physician who would heal them of bodily wounds.
Most people have attributed this apathy to dire poverty and lack of
education. Obviously, this analysis no longer applies. The throng in
Chengdu was most likely well fed and adequately educated. Besides their
curiosity, the state of mind was different from the spectators at the
execution some 100 years ago.
For a long time we were deprived of all good clean fun. Once the
floodgates opened, everything rushed out, including the basest instincts.
This is entertainment with a vengeance, what popular websites call
"entertaining to death." People, hopefully a minority, do not seem to
know when to laugh and when to cry, or at the very minimum, to keep a
straight face and be appropriately solemn. They have mistaken human
decency for hypocrisy.
Why does a society that shapes a budding mind with awe and reverence end
up with adults who fail to respect anything, even life itself? Could it
be that such qualities as helping the weak and unfortunate are instilled
rather than inbred and become slogans to be recited rather than virtues
to be integrated?
This is not a cultural issue. Both Chinese and Western cultures teach one
to be kind and helpful. However, we are living in a time of such fast
change that we can almost feel the sands shifting under our feet.
Reattaching what was cut off by political turmoil might be futile, but
the garden of moral principles will certainly grow and bloom again. It
will take time because the weeds of twisted minds can only be corrected
by enlightenment.
raymondzhou@chinadaily.com.cn
(China Daily 01/06/2007 page4)
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