Expecting a culture of care

During Little 500 weekend, I experienced a plethora of interesting sights, sounds and smells that I’ve never encountered and hopefully never have to experience again.

I saw drunken people dart out into the middle of the street without looking. I witnessed an overabundance of wasted girls falling over their own feet. One or a dozen fistfights evolved on street corners, and I definitely saw a group of people drinking in a church parking lot.

What happened Saturday, however, exemplified both the good side and the bad side of IU’s party culture.

On Saturday night, my friends and I drove into the parking lot by the SRSC and started our mission to find a parking space. As we drove around, we noticed a rather intoxicated girl, who will not be named, lying naked from the waist down on the concrete.

We stopped the car and my friend, who is female, got out and, with a group of other women, got the girl dressed again. At this point, a group of guys standing in the distance had called the cops, who then arrived. After the police questioned the girl, they thanked us for helping and calling the police because “most people would’ve just kept driving.”

Though it’s a great thing that all these people worked to help this girl, it’s quite shameful that we live in a culture where helping a vulnerable, scared college girl is considered rare or unexpected.

Here at IU, we pride ourselves on our Culture of Care. The Culture of Care program recently put out a video in which actors performed various tasks on hidden camera in public. These actors did things like pretend to be intoxicated, pretend to be homophobic and pretend to break down and cry.

In this video, somebody helped every single person.

While this video shows the great side of IU, I feel it doesn’t adequately address the issue of aiding someone in need, particularly during Little 500. As the police said, not everyone would stop to help — a lot of people would’ve just left her there — where she could’ve been raped or otherwise was assaulted.

Issues like these are easy to brush under the rug when you aren’t faced with them directly. But I feel as though many people brush them off even when these situations happen right in front of them.

This girl might have been lucky enough to be seen by several kind passersby, but for every good Samaritan there’s someone willing to look the other way. I saw several cars pull into the parking lot before us, none of which stopped or did anything.

I only pray and hope that people didn’t end up in situations like these during Little 500 without getting help. Because that’s not what we do here in Bloomington.

Here at IU, we do what was done Saturday in that parking lot. We look out for one another. Classmates help classmates, neighbors help neighbors and Hoosiers help Hoosiers. Or at least that’s how it should be.

ajguenth@indiana.edu