37 Who Saw Murder Didn T Call The Police And The Plague

Testing Humanity
Humanity is defined as the quality or state of being human. Now to be human is defined according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary as having good or bad qualities that people usually have. “37 Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call the Police” and “The Plague” both test the level of humanity or “quality of being human” of the people mentioned in both passages as well as its audience.
The title “37 Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call the Police” directly tells us that 37 people witnessed a homicide occur and didn’t feel compelled to call the authorities. When you dive further into the article it gets more into detail on what happened. A community as a whole witnessed one of their own being slaughtered and stood by. To illustrate paragraph fourteen

The difference being in the time of the plague everyone was acting this way. For instance, “Everywhere reports speak of the sick dying too fast for the living to bury”, this quote from paragraph 9 clearly shows us of the regularity of things like this happening. In paragraph 11 as well, “In Paris, where the plague lasted through 1349, the reported death rate was 800 a day, in Pisa 500, in Vienna 500 to 600”, mortality was happening all over Europe. Those people had no choice but to stand by and watch. In the case of “37 Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call the Police” it was not a worldwide case. Things like this weren’t happening everywhere. So when people heard about it in the news or paper they were shocked at the lack of responsibility these people had for one of their own. Even the witnesses themselves have no real concrete explanations for their actions, “Houses near the railroad station, find it difficult to explain why they didn’t call the police” (paragraph 29). Considering this, us as the audience get hit in our core with a moral struggle. We automatically put them in the wrong for the simple reason that; our world has evolved since the time of the plague. As a result of this, people view it in a much more shocking and outrageous manner that one of their own was