The Aerie
Various events today got me thinking about the way we Americans disassociate ourselves from the world.
The first was one of the latest London transit bombings, someone who fortunately wasn't seriously hurt. She repeated a phrase I've heard very frequently in similar situations: "It was like something from a movie."
I think one of the latest Darwinian survival selectors has to be "ability to quickly re-grasp reality following disaster." I suspect that the people best suited to survive disasters are not the ones who experience all subsequent events through a blur of unreality. Probably the ones who survive best are the ones who say "Crap, that was real, I'd better think about what to do next." Dissassociation is dangerous.
I saw this earlier when my family and I were on our way to see a movie - my third viewing of "War of the Worlds," as a matter of fact. Just such a movie as victims of disasters find called to mind in moments of crisis.
Anyway my family and I were driving along West River Parkway past a quiet portion of Minnehaha Park, when I saw something that chilled me to the bone. I very, very small child, younger than two years old I'd guess, running along the curb on the other side.
Now, the parkway traffic is generally slow enough that this would be of concern, but not utter panic. Any reasonable driver, one would expect, would in the first place be going rather slowly on the parkway, and in the second place have plenty of time to stop upon seeing this toddler running down the road.
But the oncoming driver DIDN'T stop. The oncoming driver slowed considerably... but could not seem to understand that his need to get wherever the hell he was going was NOT greater than that baby's need to not-be-run-over. While the five or six miles an hour at which he passed the child probably seemed to him to be a snail's pace, my heart was in my throat from the moment I realized that he wasn't going to stop until he had completed passing the child.
Mind you: we're talking about a two-year-old, running along the gutter, and a car crawling past mere inches away. All that kid had to do, at every moment that the car was passing him, was swerve, turn, stumble, or fall to his left, and he would have been roadkill.
I was in a panic by the time the oncoming car reached me - I was honking the horn without thinking of it (indeed, whenever I try to honk the horn on this stupid car I can never find the right spot on the steering wheel to press), yelling aloud, and trying to remember how to lower the window of my van. Still, I managed to catch the eye of the lad driving the other car, and I hope he could read my lips saying "You stop the car!"
Fortunately it all worked out. I stopped until I could see, coming across the park and still at quite a distance, the child's father - looking not at all concerned, by the way. The toddler had reached the family's truck, and an older sibling - all of maybe six - had taken him in hand.
This, in turn, reminded me of a news article I read earlier in the day. The report was of a woman who had been in a multi-car accident in Florida. As she lay bleeding on the pavement, she could hear tires crunching through the broken glass near her head, as drivers intent on reaching their destinations crept through the accident scene in order to be on their way.
I have to believe that the Florida drivers, like the lad driving the oncoming car this evening, are basically good people. I don't think that all these cars were piloted by natural sociopaths.
But I suspect that lives spent in front of the TV caused these people - and who know how many other people - to disassociate diasters from their own lives. And positioned safely behind the glass of a moving vehicle, I think it was all too easy for them to forget that the people they were trying to squeeze past in their hurries, those people were REAL. I don't think those drivers categorized the people outside the car as being as fully human as, say, the other people in their cars.
One scene in War of the Worlds is of a man videotaping the aliens. Moments later his camera drops empty to the pavement, the man apparently vaporized as he filmed. Dissociated from the reality of what he was witnessing, he failed to run away with everyone else in the crowd.
If we're going to survive as individuals, we need to deliberately seek to maintain our grasp on reality and avoid dissociating ourselves from the people and events around us. If we're goint to survive as a civilization and a species, we need to avoid dissociating ourselves from each other and the events of our world.
Because it's not alien robots who pose the threat, it's we ourselves and our lethal behaviors who are bringing on the crisis. And if we can't acknowledge a crisis that we ourselves create, how can we ever hope to survive it?
Posted by Albatross at July 22, 2005 11:45 AM