Blood in South Philly

Let me set the scene: It's around 6:30 p.m. earlier this evening, I'm riding the 7, and I'm sitting on the right side of the bus in the row immediately in front of the rear exit. I'm on my way to PetSmart to pick-up some cat food and cat litter for Rocky and the Baby.

We've just passed through the Point Breeze section of the city when a woman boards with her young son. The little boy, probably 3 years old, boards the bus and heads down the aisle at an all-out sprint. As his mom pays the fare, the bus starts moving forward, and the boy, already running full-tilt, runs headlong and falls face-first into the step that leads to the back, upper section of the bus. As his mom comes up the aisle, the boy starts crying, then the mother picks him up and realizes that he's bleeding heavily from his nose and his mouth. The mother begins freaking out, yelling out loud that someone call 911.

The bus driver soon pulls up and stops at the corner of 23rd and Passyunk. All the passengers are just staring at the woman and her young son. I'm sitting right across the aisle from them, feeling helpless, and thinking I'm no damn doctor, I wish I could do something to help them. Finally, a teenage girl gets up and calls 911.

After about five minutes, the cops and some medics show up on the scene. All the while, the woman is yelling at her son to open his eyes and not to fall asleep, and he continues to bleed profusely from his nose and from his mouth, crying out loud. It's a really messed up situation. Once there, the medics come onto the bus, check out the boy, then put him in a neck brace and onto a stretcher, the kid is really freaking out, and the mother is clearly no comfort to the boy as she is out of control too.

The mom, once she talked to one of the cops, wanted to blame the bus driver for pulling forward too quickly. And I guess that would be her impression since she didn't even see her son running full-speed toward the back of the bus. Her attitude seemed representative of an inner-city attitude that is quick to point fingers at someone else, while failing to realize that she even had any responsibility to begin with, on top of the fact that she had no capability to step up to the plate as a mother should do when her son truly needs her to do so. By no means am I intending to apply my generalization to every young, inner-city mother or resident, but based on my personal observation and experience, this finger-pointing attitude seems endemic to the city's culture. The truth is that the bus driver did nothing wrong, the kid simply had an accident, if anyone was to blame, it's the mother for allowing her 3-year old son to run onto a public bus at a full-out sprint. I'm aware that it's easy to judge, and who knows how I would act and react in that type of situation, so my thoughts should obviously be taken with a grain of salt.

But ultimately, my final thought is one of fruitless regret: if I had just reached my arm out into the aisle, I could have easily caught the kid before he fell nose-first into the step at the back of the bus. As they say, hindsight is 20/20, but even still, I can't help thinking that if I had done so, there's a real chance that I would've been yelled at for interfering with someone else's child. And so it went: blood in South Philly.