Canary in the Coal Mine

Simon Conway is a Brit and a naturalized American citizen who has a U.S. radio show. I have never heard of him before this article, but the column is well worth reading. He grew up in London and is horrified by the jihadist butchering of a British soldier in broad daylight on a London street, but he is equally horrified by what he saw from his former countrymen. I will let him speak for himself.

"This is the country I chose to leave because it was slowly becoming unrecognizable to me. And I know in my heart that if you transplanted that atrocious scene on a London street yesterday, to an American street today, then the outcome would have been entirely different. People, as they did in Boston, would run TOWARDS the danger.

So what happened yesterday? What could possess a crowd to watch two men with knives and machetes hack to death another human being? And why was the only reaction to pull out phones and shoot pictures and video? How could these people then wait 20 minutes for the police to show up without any attempt to take down these terrorists?

It took most of the day for me to reach my conclusion, but I have arrived at something that is really quite uncomfortable - more so because we here in the United States are currently headed down the same path. We might be 10 or 15 or even 20 years away, but unless we change direction then we too will simply record an event and do nothing to try and save another human being."
townhall.com/columnists/simonconway/2013/05/23/london-a-deeper-horror-than-we-might-think-n1604717

He believes that the Brits have become so thoroughly wards of the government that they cannot imagine taking the initiative, even in a life-or-death situation. 

It has in fact happened here before - think the Kitty Genovese murder in NYC - but it is not typical American behavior. Conway says that Todd Beamer and his colleagues are much more typically American:

"There’s one picture I’ve seen of one of the terrorists with at least 17 people in the background. All I can think of are the last heard words of 9-11 hero Todd Beamer on Flight 93.

'Are you guys ready? Let's roll'

He wasn’t talking about video cameras."

Indeed Todd Beamer wasn't. May it ever be so!