The beating of Tashawnea Hill at the Cracker Barrel restaurant in Morrow, Ga., could possibly be charged as a hate crime, the FBI reports. Troy Dale West Jr., of Poulan, Ga., is facing charges including misdemeanor battery and disorderly conduct after allegedly beating Army reservist Tashawnea Hill, 35, after the two exchanged words at the entrance of the restaurant on Sept. 9. West alleges that Hill spat on him after he almost hit her 7-year-old daughter while swinging open the exit door, a charge Hill and her attorney deny. The surveillance video apparently shows no evidence of Hill spitting on West. Hill reportedly told West that she was in the Army Reserve and wanted no trouble before he began punching her in the face.
The saddest part of this horrific story is that no one, and I’m sorry, but I’m talking about the men in particular, rushed to stop this. I don’t care if you don’t know the specifics of the situation, seeing a man pummeling a woman in a public restaurant — never mind the fact that he was screaming “Black n—– b—-!” as he punched her with her child looking on — should have been more than enough to trigger an instantaneous reaction from those sitting there watching. Where were the men to pull him off of her? Why did no one rush to her aid?
It’s a sad and troubling indictment of our society as a whole. Growing up in the South, I always heard the jokes about New Yorkers and how they didn’t “care about people,” the same way the genteel Southerners do. We’ve all heard the story of Kitty Genovese, the woman who was murdered in 1964 in Queens, N.Y., on a sidewalk, as onlookers did nothing. The stereotype has always been that that was how things were in New York, but after hearing of this episode at the Cracker Barrel in Georgia, it’s become painfully evident that apathy isn’t limited to one locale anymore — and truthfully, it never has been.
We like to think that people are good and decent and wouldn’t allow something terrible like a beating to happen right in front of them, but in an era where we spend so much of our time with our eyes glued to miniature computer screens and our ears plugged with iPods and Zunes, maybe we’ve been become so detached that even reacting to what’s happening to someone else means less and less. Public shootings seem to happen monthly around the nation and adults get into juvenile shouting matches in the most inappropriate of places. We’ve gotten to the point where we’re tuning each other out and slowly caring less about the next person.
We should all be ashamed of what happened at that restaurant in Morrow, Ga. Angry at Troy West for his hate and his cowardice, but ashamed for everyone else that was in the vicinity and just sat idly by — and ashamed for what that says about where we are as a people, as a culture, and as a nation.
