COVER -> RECOMMENDED DAILY REQUIREMENT
OUR SHARED DESTINATION - Last week, a friend and fellow writer -- who only a couple weeks earlier lost a freelance gig he had with a flagging dot-com -- informed me that his grand-daughter had been hit by a tractor-trailer truck and dragged underneath it for miles. The truck was so large that the driver didn't even know he was dragging the woman in her mangled vehicle until alerted by another driver on the highway. The young woman is now in an induced coma in an intensive care unit (ICU.)
The enormity of a tragedy like this is such that it leaves one breathless. What can you say? My policy has always been, the less the better.
We humans are relatively good at preparing for the types of calamities we can anticipate, like the snowstorm the meteorologists tell you to anticipate (usually with hyperbolics and falsely;) it's the unforeseen bolts from the blue the gods afflict us with that are most devastating. There is no way to prepare for them.Even if there were, the nature and multiplicity of potential bolts from above are such that you would have to live in a bunker to come close to total preparedness.
My friend and his wife make regular visits to the hospital. The prognosis is good, he says, though the doctors induced the coma to spare the young woman the suffering she would have to endure. There is nothing uplifting about a hospital ICU, so my heart and prayers go out to this family.
And this kind of thing brings out thoughts on the deeper issue of our shared destination. The young woman apparently fell asleep at the wheel while driving home from work, precipitating this accident. There are so many trivial ways for us to rush toward our shared destination.
Though most media, and especially television, drum home to us how dangerous this world is, the truth is that it is also and more often banal. Most of us will not reach our shared destination in a fireball or through some violent intervention, we will simply slump into it because of deterioration. Less than a whimper, more likely with a yawn...
There's enough evidence to show that most of human activity is prompted by boredom rather than passion, by despair rather than inspiration. Commoner or king, we all know we are headed to the same place... what separates us is only the speed and comfort of the journey to our shared destination.
Knowing this, you would think that we would take better care with each other -- not out of fear, but because of reverence. The very uncertainty of the journey should prompt us to treasure each encounter, one with the other, knowing it could be our last. It mystifies me why we don't do this.
I think of a man I know, this fellow's former manager, whose favorite expression seemed to be, "I don't know what to tell you." He said this, habitually, not so much because he didn't have an opinion, but more as an expression of his boredom with having to talk about anything other than his own life. Having to listen to anything about anyone else's, or yours, was a huge waste of time for this gentleman.
He spent much of his time with me trying to dissuade me from my own concern for the circumstances of others.
In my own conversations with this man, I began to notice that his estimation of other people was contingent on how much they could advance his career or contribute to this own interests --- everyone else was either a fool or an over-rated competitor. Fools bored him like everyone else; competitors were only of interest in how he could discover how to best them.
I had to wonder, and still do, what could lead someone to reach that place... How could anyone feel so little for other people and value them even less?
In the news tonight, I hear there has been another school shooting, this one in California. Fifteen people wounded, two of them killed; another example of the lives of others being devalued.
I've been around long enough to know that there will always be people who are so self-absorbed that the rest of us are the scenery of their existence in their own minds and that there will always be people, both powerful and commonplace, for whom human life is cheap. Massacres and little murders have both always abounded, the very notion of the sacredness of life -- human or otherwise -- is treated as a novelty. That is why we have lionized those few people who espoused it from Buddha to Schweitzer. This, too, mystifies me. I am left incredulous that our own suffering, large or small, does not make us more, rather than less, careful with each other.
Every day I find myself asking, "Is there something I'm missing about us? Is it easier to callous than compassionate?"
No answer ever comes.
This week's Poll: The new daily G21 schedule is...?
WEB SITE PICK OF THE DAY: Thanks (and a tip of the hat) to Ric Williams in Austin, TX, for sending us the link to this great page of Computer Enhancements some of us really, really want. It's a hoot!
