Like many college students on Spring Break, my friends and I went to a country music festival in Palm Beach, Florida. If you’ve ever been to or heard of a music festival (especially a Southern country music festival), you know they’re shambly, rowdy and very few people are sober. As we were mingling (meeting all the kids with whom our host friend went to high-school), I noticed a distressing situation.

A complete stranger, being held up by the elbows, looked like she was about to double over; in the next split-second, she was projectile-vomiting everywhere. All the kids surrounding her jumped back, making noises of disgust. I dropped the conversation I was having and ran the ten feet between us to help her. Some jerk simultaneously whipped out his phone and started filming it, presumably for Snapchat -- I put my hand in front of the lens and waved him away. I collected her long blonde hair in one hand, easing her to the ground as she continued throwing up on my arm and on the ground. We took a few stumbling steps to the nearby bushes where she dropped to her knees and continued throwing up.

She started crying hysterically, saying, “It’s not my fault,” in between heaves. I instantly felt my stomach drop, assuming the worst. Was she drugged? Raped? Meanwhile, I had no idea who this girl was, or where her friends were. All I could do was alternate between patting her on the back and giving her space, repeating of, "Of course it's not your fault," as she wretched, making pained noises between each lurch forward. A security guard approached us asking if we needed help -- I nodded my head, and said, “Yeah, I think someone might have given her something or assaulted her, she’s saying something happened to her.” He put his hands up in a gesture implying he wanted nothing to do with us and left.

I was disgusted, but at that moment, her two (female) friends -- who were noticeably less drunk than she -- arrived. We asked her if she thought she got drugged. She didn’t respond, only repeating her mantra from earlier. A guy appeared and asked us if we wanted anything, “A pretzel, a condom?” I got in his face, and told him to “f*** off.” When I looked back a second later, he was gone. We asked her if she was forced to do anything she didn’t want to do. She confirmed. Dread washing over me, I asked who the boy holding her up, from before, was; they said it was a jackass from their high school. I asked her if he had been the one who did something; she confirmed once more.

One of her friends started panicking, saying, “You always do this, you always drink too much.” My breath hitched -- the last thing she needed was blame. I told both of her friends, “Listen, whatever happened isn’t her fault, and telling her this right now isn’t going to help. It’s going to be fine. Let’s just get her cleaned up and find out what happened.” The girl who had snapped took a deep breath and nodded. We propped her up and held her from both sides as we made our way to the communal restroom, where we found a sink and started helping her clean herself.

Calmer and less sick after having purged the alcohol in her stomach, she was able to speak. Washing her face, she ashamedly told us she had been too drunk to resist as the boy her friends called a jackass made out with her, stopping only when she threw up. Twisted relief accompanied the realization that nothing worse had happened.

Practically reading my thoughts, the friend who freaked out said, “At least he didn’t force you to have sex with him.” She begged her not to drink so much at the next music festival. Carefully, I offered what I could: “Nothing like what just happened, or worse, that could happen to anybody, is your fault.“ Regretful that this was the reality, I conceded: “But your friend has a point. There’s no reason to drink so much in a place where you don’t know if people would help you or not and you guys are still kind of young.” If I hadn’t jumped in, who would have helped her until her friends found us? The kid filming it? The kid asking if we wanted a condom? Would her friends have even known what to do?

I told all of them, “No matter where you are, how drunk you are, you don’t owe anyone anything, not a hello, not your body. He is trash. If you see him in school, the next time you go out, he doesn’t deserve another glance from any of you.” I wondered if they had ever been given a similar message in a culture where the first young man of the situation forced a wasted girl to hook up with him until she threw up, the second filmed it when she did throw up, and the third asked if she wanted a condom as she wiped her lips in the aftermath. However, the girls seemed to take my words into consideration, and I hope they remember the incident enough to be empowered by my intervention and their own resilience.

When we finished cleaning her up and parted ways, I had never seen more relieved faces in my life, and if the helplessness I had felt earlier was any indication, I can’t imagine how scared and dreadful they felt. I was rattled by the incident for a while afterwards; as my own friends calmed me down, I couldn’t help but think how rattled she would have been, had she been throwing up alone, or worse, had she not thrown up at all.

The reason I’m sharing this story, in such detail, is not to get a reader to say, "Wow, go you." What I did was be a decent human being in the most basic sense, and what completely boggles my mind is how in a lawn packed with hundreds of kids, in eyes' view of dozens of people, I was the only person to help someone who obviously needed it. This is disappointing and unacceptable.

I get it -- no one wants to get vomit on their Seychelles, no one wants to leave their friends or the cute person they just met, but what the hell happened to priorities? We know the bystander effect -- the tendency to refrain from getting involved in a situation where you know an intervention is necessary because you think someone else will or is already intervening -- is deadly.

We know Kitty Genovese was brutally raped and murdered in the courtyard of her New York City apartment building, after none of her hundreds of neighbors called the police because they thought someone else was doing it. Children and families around the world continue to starve and freeze to death, because we think others are donating supplies and taking action. Politicians remain unaccountable, because we think others are already changing the system. Our planet continues to deteriorate because we think other people’s recycling makes up for our lack thereof, because other people conserve enough energy so that we don't have to. Someone braver is bound to intervene, and an abused child dies at the hands of his mother.

This isn't me preaching. This is me begging for people to stop neglecting their most basic responsibility of being human: when someone needs help, you help. We are all in this together, and it's time we start acting like it. Absolutely no one is above drinking too much, being hurt by an acquaintance or a stranger -- being in any position where they need help. It's easy to be a bystander: if it's not related to us, it's not our job, not our responsibility. But if it's not our job, whose job is it?