We Are Completely Aware of Our Surroundings...especially at the local level

I'd like to think America didn't become such a powerful nation while its citizens lived in their own personal bubbles. The facts and the way I'd like to see things are completely different, however. Here's an example:

Most people have probably heard about the woman who drowned in a Massachusetts public pool with lifeguards on duty but who wasn't discovered until 2 days later....by kids who had broken into the pool for a late night swim.

There's some scientific reasons why her body wasn't discovered on Sunday night, Monday, or during the day on Tuesday. For one, bodies sink after drowning. She was on the bottom of a 12 foot section of the pool where she was last seen by the 9 year old child she collided with that day. The chlorine in the pool slowed down the decaying process, but it's this decay which causes the body to eventually float as it was doing Tuesday night when discovered by the kids who broke into the pool. Combined with the constant disruptions of the water's surface and the cloudiness of the water in general, people wouldn't have been able to see the body from the surface too well, and it would have looked like anyone else to those who weren't really paying attention. The motion of the water's surface would have caused the body to appear to move. 

But, why did lifeguards ignore that 9 year old child when he informed them that someone might be in trouble? We're lifeguards, but we only save lives when we aren't on break? Right. That sounds like the American attitude I have come to loathe with every fiber of my being. 

And, why aren't routine checks performed every night at closing? If the woman drowned without anyone's knowledge, fine. Fine. I doubt it, but for the sake of the rant I'm on, let's say it could happen. Why wouldn't a pool open to the public have a procedure in place which requires a full check of the pool at closing and upon opening? This would ensure the safety of other pool patrons. Let's think about how fucked up the people who went to that pool those days are going to be when they realize they went swimming with a decomposing body. Even with the chlorine, I wouldn't feel clean for a very long time. Maybe that's just me. 

All in all, it's possible this woman would have died even if this pool had the top safety standards possible. It didn't. But, no matter what, if we cared more about the world around us instead of existing inside our own concerns even when we're in the job of saving lives, that woman would have been found much sooner than she was.