Once again, chilling, callous behavior of urban incivility was caught on video last week when a driver ran down a 78-year-old man on the busiest street in Hartford, Conn., and drove away—while bystanders stared and did precious little for the severely injured pedestrian.
Indifference to fellow man is becoming more common and well documented throughout the American culture. A new class is emerging, properly identified as "'Don't-Care' Americans." They're everywhere, high and low, in daily life.
The most menacing are the savage street criminals who rob, kill in drive-by-shooting, kidnap, rape, utterly insensitive or caring about human life or social civility.
Rapidly growing as a gathering place of unscrupulous don't-care Americans is the Internet. If not preying on children, others find sadistic glee in contriving hoaxes and fabricating "news" that mislead and perhaps victimize trusting, gullible readers.
Litter on public streets and highways and obscene graffiti indicate a total loss of personal manners.
By far the worst of the don't-care lot are industry, business and government.
Business uses lobbyists to manipulate public policy and laws to benefit shareholders and executives. One notorious, but legal, dodge is creating off-shore business addresses that spare corporations taxes and even help avoid obligations to employees. This has been especially beneficial to U.S. companies with contracts in Iraq. That's really a don't-care attitude.
Industry is ferocious in avoiding responsibility to the environment, usually aided by politicians whose palms have been greased with political cash contributions. This don't-care indifference is more than academic: polluted air and water cause sickness and death, and hastens the death of the planet.
What can be said of the U.S. government's wide-ranging don't-care policies? The most outrageous of these is the Iraq war, launched for flagrantly deceitful reasons, waged at conspicuously vulgar costs and purposefully beneficial to political cronies awarded billions of dollars in no-bid business contracts. The don't-care policies have resulted in thousands of needless deaths and lifetime disabilities, a broken U.S. economy now propped up by foreign lenders, and an international reputation of being a reckless and untrustworthy nation.
Naturally, with Washington setting the tone for squandering assets down to the last penny, U.S. families have joined in the profligacy. The American Interest points out in an article, "A Nation in Debt" that credit card debt tripled in just over 10 years from $238 billion to $692 billion.
What little temporary pleasure this "free money" has brought to millions of families is now being offset by the inescapable pain of bankruptcy and a realization of the costs of foolishness.
