I try to avoid commenting on current events, because I really don’t know what I’m talking about most of the time, and because you find better commentary other places. Really, you could find better commentary on MySpace, I think. So the bad news is, I can’t let the I-35W Bridge Collapse pass without some sort of comment. The good news is that the comment is coming from someone else!
From James Lileks, probably the best conservative pundit/humor writer/all around amusing individual on the web today:
I’m listening to a story on the news about a man who survived the fall – then ran to help the kids on the bus. I’d guess the fellow never considered what he might do in such a situation. Never thought about it much. Who would? But then you find yourself on a bridge that’s crashed down into the Mississippi, and you’re struggling with the seat belt buckle. It works , but your hands feel thick. You’re alive – which doesn’t seem that odd, really, you’ve always been alive, so this is just different, but you have strange thoughts about insurance and a mad swirl of panic and there’s blood in your hair but you can stand – and then you see a school bus. So you go to the bus. Of course you go the bus.
Most of us would. It’s a remarkable instinct that wells up and kicks in, and it’s something you never expected to experience. As someone said about humans: We’re at our best when things are worst.
Would you have run to the bus? I’ll answer for you: yes.
Me? I dunno. There have been FAR too many times in my life when I’ve wussed out instead of confronting something that I can’t say for sure what I’d do in that situation.
What would you do?
Update: A later Lileks post on the subject:
I heard a KSTP reporter speak on the Bob Davis show this morning – he told a story about a first responder finding someone trapped in the wreckage, dying. The rescuer handed the victim a cellphone to say goodbye to loved ones.
Jesus Q. McChristus.
Having kids definitely makes one consider one’s mortality in a more concrete way. (Don’t worry, this is leading somewhere.) When you’re, say, 20 years old, no wife, no kids, the concept of death usually occurs to you, probably as you’re about to do a drunken swan dive off of a 5th floor hotel balcony into a swimming pool, but it’s very abstract, and is treated as such. The most attention you can really give it is thoughts like “When I die, I want my ashes poured over Niagara Falls” or “Dude my funeral is TOTALLY going to have a Zydeco band!”
Once kids enter the picture, the thought of one’s own death conjures up thoughts like “Do I have enough life insurance?” and “Shoot, I’d better find myself an attorney and get a will drawn up!” An unforeseen side effect, is that you find yourself occasionally wondering what it would be like if members of your immediate family, particularly (heaven forfend) your kid(s), were to die. So there have definitely been times that I’ve sat awake at 2am in one of my fairly frequent moments of insomnia and considered what it would be like to have the state troopers show up at my door one evening to tell me that HW was in an accident and … well … we’re so sorry …
::full body shiver::
It’s probably the least healthy thing I could be thinking at any time, assuming my “many worlds” and “steering” theories have a grain of truth to them. Still, I have no more control over my train of thought than I do over a collapsing bridge, if you’ll forgive the blunt reference to the topic at hand.
Anyway, the point, and you’ll have to forgive me if I turn off my FCC filter for just one graf:
<PROFANE>
At no point, up until this very afternoon, had I ever considered the thought of hearing my wife’s dying words over a FUCKING CELLPHONE. And trust me, this is different than, say, if my wife called me from a plane that terrorists were about to crash into a building. This a phone call from someone who is already fatally injured, whose eyes are already dimming, who’s finding it harder and harder to breathe, who is seeing their own blood pouring out of them like water from a leaky fucking dyke.
</PROFANE>
So here’s a REAL question: if you were fatally injured, and almost certainly dying within the next few minutes, would you CALL anyone? If so, who?
