Detachment - One of the Big Questions

Detachment has always seemed like a cop-out to me. How can you be detached from what is happening right in front of you? It has taken me years and a lot of living to finally feel comfortable with this concept in my own life.
I was recently reminded of this on the Gaia network when a question came up after a girl was raped in broad daylight by a main road with drivers going by and no one stopped.
Now detachment as I have come to understand it from a shamanistic background is that you don't let your ego dictate doing something to get something for it. You remove or quiet that part of you so that you can listen to the softer voice of spirit or soul. When you feel authentically that you should or shouldn't do something you act on that without guilt or the knowlege that you will get patted on the back for doing it.
Many times when talking to people who obstain from getting involved in politics because it is all dirty, or in acting to save another when something happens in front of you, because they must have come in to experience this or it would not have happened to them. I have become frustrated because this is not how I see the world at all.
For myself, I agree that we come into this world to experience and grow. But the crucial difference which I have been slowly maturing inside myself is that you don't know what another being has come in to experience. They don't even know at this level. They could have come in to experience being attacked or raped or just as easily they could have come in to experience someone stepping up and saying no, you cannot harm this being and so experience being valued enough to be saved from being harmed.
There are always at least two ways that any decision or situation can go in life.
From looking at this through my own lens of an extremely abused child during the first 18 years of my life, I see that as a very small child I was not able to physically make the person who abused me stop. If it was going to happen it would have had to come from someone else. No one, not my mother, not my teachers, not the police who worked with my father and knew what was going on by seeing me with broken bones and bruises all my life, not even the people who continually treated me in the doctors office or the hospital where I grew up ever did that for me.
It wasn't because they were detached. It was because they didn't want to rock the boat and the man of the house basically could still do what he wanted to at that time.
With that being said, it only took one man to stand up to my father when he saw me run into his house for shelter after my father tried to kill me to stop it all and all he did was walk up to my father and tell him in front of witnesses that if he ever touched me again in anger he would press charges and put him in jail.
My father stopped hitting me from that day forward and I have never forgotten the man who stepped forward to do this.
So my position on detachment is this. Listen to your own souls voice; the gut feeling that you should or should not do something. If you feel like doing something because it is going to make you a hero in front of someone you want to impress, your listening to ego instead. If you just feel it and know it is right. Do it in the moment. It does not have to be a big thing like getting out of your car and tackeling a person who is doing a crime, it could be stopping your car on the road and laying your hand on the horn until the others driving by stop or also honk to get any cops attention.
Remember both of you you and the person being harmed in some way have come to learn here not just them. Perhaps your own growth depends upon being able to step outside your ego for once and participate to make the world a better place for another....
Namaste