I was walking my dog at ten the other night when I had a Kitty Genovese experience. I was walking past a brownstone on West End Avenue and an elderly homeless lady had fallen down face front onto the stoop either out of exhaustion or because of something more serious. She was stretched out and motionless and her stuff was strewn around her and you could smell her a block away. I immediately conjured up the story of Kitty Genovese. She was a woman who some fifty years ago had screamed for help for a while when attacked in a courtyard and no one had apparently come to her rescue even though by that time the nine-eleven calling system had been installed in New York City. The story spawned a cottage industry of social psychological studies. How could people have been so inhumane as to ignore her pleas? The answer is that people had not been indifferent. Numerous people had called 911 and others who heard her had assumed that others would do the calling, which was not only a reasonable assumption but one that proved out true. It was just that people were expecting the authorities to handle the matter rather than risk their own safety should her tormenter still be around. That, at least, is my interpretation of the incident. That is a far more benign explanation than the one first offered, which was that people do not think themselves part of a community and therefore responsible for one another. That Fifties explanation was supplied for a Fifties event.

What should I do in these circumstances similar to those of the Kitty Genovese situation, but this time forewarned of how any action I took or did not take might be judged? I said to myself that the woman had probably just fallen down the way homeless people do though in a dramatic position and that I did not have a cell phone while most everyone else who wanders down West End Avenue at 10 pm does. I told myself I would check back when I was on the return leg of my journey with my dog and that if she were still lying there I would call 911 as soon as I got home. I felt guilty about being so passive, unwilling to take responsibility for the event, intervening as best I could, by perhaps stopping a stranger or another dog walker and asking that person to make the 911 call, and yet also not wanting to seem foolish by overreacting to what probably was nothing at all. I am sure that some of those who heard Kitty Genovese scream thought it was probably nothing at all, just a domestic dispute or one of those people who take to screaming in the night.

A screaming fire truck passed me by on the homeward leg of my journey. I felt relieved because I suspected what had happened was what I thought would happen. There were plenty of people on West End Avenue to make the call. When I arrived at the brownstone, the woman was standing and packing up her strewn belongings while firefighters dressed for more dangerous work stood around, some of them with disapproving looks on their faces, though whether for the woman or the distraction from their other work I could not say. I did not see a policeman there who might be supervising taking the woman to a homeless shelter or was empowered to move her along, though perhaps firefighters are empowered to do that in such circumstances.

The incident was over and I wondered whether my judgment in not stopping had been vindicated or simply proven to be inconsequential as far as the well being of the homeless lady was concerned. How do you tell when a situation really does require individual intervention or whether the procedures that exist can manage it? If she had been aflame, I would have tried to douse the flames; if she had been chatting with herself, I would never have thought there to be any need to intervene because I know workers with the homeless cruise the streets on cold nights to try to lure homeless people into shelters that are not all that attractive because the homeless, so I understand, are more likely to be victimized in the shelters than in the streets. Also, there are more homeless along West End Avenue than there used to be, which is true all over the city, a result, so I have been told, of increased unemployment in New York City. I have seen them camping out this fall in front of churches and apartment buildings. I suppose that I have therefore become somewhat more used to the homeless this year than was the case in recent winters. And, anyway, it was not all that cold yet. The woman would not have frozen to death.

There are at least three ways to conceptualized what occurred in this incident, each one engaging reality in a presumptively different way. A formal approach treats the incident as an example of some transcendental formula that applies in all times and all places. So Kitty Genovese is abstracted into being one part of an equation, perhaps the deviant as that person relates to the normal, in which case she is shunned because her screaming announced her to be someone already living outside the bounds of normal life. In that case, the displeasure or injustice that seemed to arise in the original incident was the fact that she was, in fact, one of the normals who was responding as a normal might to being assaulted and therefore should have been protected rather than spurned. We worry more about casualties from friendly fire than from enemy fire because we are supposed to trust our own. It takes the invocation of a generalized humanity to see the homeless lady as one of us, despite her smell.

Another equation among the many in which to place Genovese and the homeless lady is to treat them as the resultants of a social structure that has not yet developed mechanisms which can cope with homeless people, much less with all those people who are somewhat distressed, whether because of poverty or mental illness, and wander around the world making the best of it they can. In that case, attention is to be turned to the procedures of fire departments and the 911 number and how to help people who are not terribly good at wanting to be helped. There is no need to see these as among the people oppressed by capitalism, only to see them as people who Jesus noticed as not having their names on the lists of those who are or might be taken care of by authorities.

A second approach is to see Genovese and the homeless lady as part of a historical transition more significant than the switch to cell phones, though perhaps not grander than what Jesus was proposing, which was that all humanity should be given the care that one gives to family members. Kitty Genovese was a transitional moment between a society organized around personal help and personal relations and one organized around organizations, which is to say a society in which it becomes somebody’s job to intervene into what is no longer merely or primarily an individual responsibility. We feel guilty because of the residue of a sense of individual responsibility, when that is an archaic responsibility, my own slightly troubled conscious not totally caught up to the notion that there were, in fact, institutions in place to take care of this matter, that a perfect universe would be one where no one had to make cell phone calls, what with cameras everywhere for security purposes that also include individual crises. We call up “security” at the university so we can get into our offices when we have forgotten the key, don’t we? That is a good thing, not a bad thing, that there is always someone to call, and yet it is a long transition for this to catch on, one perhaps at least as a few thousand years old, though perhaps also as short as the time between my incident and the Kitty Genovese incident because Genovese symbolized society’s failure at having made the transition and now the homeless woman symbolizes the society’s success at having made the transition.

A third approach is to treat the event of the homeless lady as a cultural one in that the Kitty Genovese story came readily to my mind as it did, I am sure, to many of the people along West End Avenue, most of whom had run across it in social science courses of one sort or another. A mind stocked with this story will see the similarities and differences between the two incidents and try to make sense of that. The Genovese story is part of something that might be considered an equivalent of urban folklore: it is scientifically approved lore, like the Milgram experiments that show students to be willing to torture people, or lore approved by scholarship, such as how some minorities, the Jews and the Chinese, are successful because of their devotion to education. Neither of these conjectures may even be true, but they have arrived at being the conventional wisdom as that is told us in school.

I am not sure that there are any more than these three approaches. The formal or scientific approach tells what claims to be true; the historical approach tells what has happened in history, as that changes, and so is true to the way societies are structured in one place and time or another; the cultural approach tells what people in groups think or feel or imagine to be true as that has been formed and refined in cultural institutions, whatever may be its bearing on the real truth of the matter. What else is there but these three? For all I know, the three may be versions of the truth different only in the formulation. What I find even more interesting is that while the claims at universality move from the formal to the historical to the cultural, the significance of the three approaches may be in the other direction. What lives with us is our cultural understanding of a phenomenon. That was the case with Kitty Genovese and, in my mind, in the ambiguities a particular homeless lady led me to ruminate about. That real life woman has already slipped into being a thought in my mind, which may be why Jesus appears to me to have been always angry with the people around him who always, inevitably, lost sight of actual human suffering.