Bystander Behavior

In life, it is almost always easiest just to walk on by and pretend like you never saw anything. Sadly, I find myself doing this a lot. Because I like keeping myself busy, I often make my excuse "I just don't have any time to spare to take care of this one little problem," and that is never the right attitude. In 18 years of life, I have learned, slowly but surely, what goes around comes around. If you don't take the initiative to help someone, they won't take the initiative for you when you need it.
There have been plenty of opportunities in life where I have been a bystander. I bystand friends being rude to other friends all the time. I walk right past the booths in the Union because I have somewhere I need to be. Even the small things can make you a bystander in everyday life. It is usually so much easier to take the low road and walk on by, but I know now that I need to start being that bigger person and helping out where I can.
There was a time in my high school volleyball practice where our coach was raising her voice enough to make a girl on our team cry. She was raising her voice about how this girl never took anything seriously in practice or in life when in reality, she just has the happy-go-lucky personality and was naturally goofy. It is especially difficult to stand up to people who are older than you. I really wish I said something to my coach about it, but instead we just went on with our practice and when we had a break, we comforted our teammate. Looking back, I still wish I would've said something because in my opinion, no one has the right to be yelled at, and our coach really couldn't see all sides of the conflict.
Making the transition to college, you would think that all the high school drama would stay back home and the cliques and peer pressure would do the same. However, there is still just as much in college as there is in high school. I think college kids choose to take the easy route because there is still potential for them to get judged and made fun of for doing the right thing. College is still about making new friends and meeting new people, but all of those friends can vanish in the blink of an eye if a person takes one wrong step. It is still a nasty, nasty world out there. Most college kids see this as a major problem, and therefore, don't want to take the initiative to do the right thing. They would rather pretend like nothing happened, keep their friends, and move on with life.
It can really be a hard decision to do the right thing, but speaking from experience, you do get some reward from it. I mean, we aren't trying to save the world by doing one good deed now are we?


Until next time,
Carrie