Bill Nye Collapses, Students Tweet

Bill Nye “The Science Guy” was giving a presentation at USC in front of hundreds of students yesterday when he collapsed. And then something very odd happened – nothing.

Yahoo News reports:

It appears that the students in attendance, rather than getting up from their seats to rush to Nye’s aid, instead pulled out their mobile devices to post information about Nye’s loss of consciousness.

Alastair Fairbanks, a USC senior in attendance for Nye’s presentation, told the Los Angeles Times that “nobody went to his aid at the very beginning when he first collapsed — that just perplexed me beyond reason.” The student added, “Instead, I saw students texting and updating their Twitter statuses. It was just all a very bizarre evening.”

Indeed, a cursory search on Twitter revealed a virtual play-by-play account of the incident. One student wrote, “Bill Nye tripped on his computer cord while speaking at USC, was out for abt 5 secs, got back up, spoke w/ slurred speech and fainted.

That’s pretty disturbing isn’t it?

Are we raising a nation of objective observers more comfortable with commenting on people in need than actually helping them?

I don’t have any answers but I can say that there have been a number of incidents played out for the world to see where people in need have been ignored. In fact, YouTube can give one a rather dismal view of humanity.

There’s a point where apathy becomes evil, isn’t there? There’s times when doing nothing is the worst thing. It seems this was one of those times.