A Roman Tragedy

Normally I wouldn't write about this, but I am so incredibly incensed and disgusted by this story that I had to at least mention it on this blog.

The story goes like this: Two Roma (or gypsy, an ethnic minority in Italy) girls were selling trinkets and other goods just outside of Naples, when they decided to take a swim in the nearby beach. The four girls soon found themselves caught in a riptide and struggled to keep afloat.

Here's where it gets revolting: On the beach, just a few feet away, dozens of sunbathers WATCHED as the girls drowned, and did nothing. It was minutes before somebody even alerted authorities to rescue the girls.

Even more disgusting: When the girls were finally pulled ashore, the bodies of two of the girls (cousins, aged 12 and 13) who could not be saved were laid out on the beach with towels covering their bodies and their feet poking out. But, as the bodies lay there on the beach waiting for the families of the victims to identify them, the sunbathers simply "carried on having lunch or sunbathing just a few meters away."

I simply could not believe this story when I read it. For this to happen in this day and age, in the cradle of Western Civilization - in a land of people so fiercely self-described as Christians, no less! - is incomprehensible. How anyone, Christian or otherwise, could have looked out on the beach that day, watching two young girls die, and so callously decided to do nothing is so inconceivable, so beyond human understanding that I have to question whether those people were truly human at all. For the life of me I can not - or, perhaps, I just don't want to - believe that they are.

I am well aware of the atrocities humans are capable of committing towards one another in the name of war, religion, love, hatred and otherwise. But these girls weren't enemies of anybody, they weren't prisoners of war or victims of circumstance. They were victims of that most inhuman of human emotions - disregard.

British statesman Edmund Burke once said, "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." I am sure the people sitting on the beach that day would consider themselves "good" people. Perhaps they go to church every Sunday and confess their sins, and donate to charity. But when the time came for these people to act, to do some good, even when faced with the clear knowledge that doing nothing would mean four girls could die, they did what Edmund Burke feared they would do: nothing.

They didn't even get up when the families came to carry their dead daughters off in coffins. They simply looked on, then looked away and went on with their day. After all, the sunsets in Naples are to die for.

"Sometimes I wonder... will God ever forgive us for what we've done to each other? Then I look around and I realize... God left this place a long time ago." - Blood Diamond