Bystander effect in France

Here's a nice twitter retribution story. I've written before about how bus-drivers sometimes think they are ship-captains with a tendency to the arbitrary use of power. Indulging pretty girls about where to stop the bus; but being a stickler for official stops when dealing with struggling black mothers-of-two. Not to mention being arbitrarily offensive to my tanned pal. But sometimes (maybe this just happens in France but I don't think so), the bus-driver uses his arbitrary power to good effect:

Hier en attendant le bus à Paris, personne ne voulait se pousser. Comme personne ne bougeait le chauffeur s'est levé et à dit "Terminus ! Tout le monde descend! Après il est venu me voir et m’a dit "vous pouvez monter et les autres , vous attendez celui d'après! François Le Berre.
M. Le Berre was waiting for the bus to Paris but when it arrived nobody on board would shuffle back to allow him and his wheel-chair to board. Driver yells "Terminus! everyone on the bus, get off. You, Monsieur les Roues, may come aboard. Everyone else can wait for the next bus . . . what a shower".

This may remind you of last month's viral video where an elderly black woman was subjected to a tirade of racist abuse on a Ryanair flight from Spain. The commentary was largely beating up on Ryanair for not training its staff to deal effectively or fairly with such incidents. Few took the stance that everyone within hearing distance, if not the whole plane, was culpable to failure to stand up for les droits de l'homme or indeed, in this case, les droits de la Femme et de la Citoyenne. I've had a rant about the bovine 98% who stand and watch while evil is perpetrated before their eyes and think that it's not their business . . . The Man will sort it out. My fellow workers at The Institute won't be thanking the anonymous person who humbly put on a rubber glove and prized all the chewing gum out of the urinals last week again: thereby reducing the chance of a flush flood. Great as I am cleaning up other people's shite, I am no better than average standing up for their rights when things get awkward.