Life moves so fast there seems to be no time to savor, abhor or merely ponder what just happened, and there’s a raw human need for that. So, if you don’t mind, I would like to stand off to the side of the fast current, where it’s still Wednesday at 12:40 p.m.
Like most Americans, I feel shocked, if not by personal experiences, then by phenomena and events: ongoing gun violence in Baltimore, mass shootings across the country every week, the horrible war in Ukraine, more than 50,000 dead and millions in Turkey and Syria displaced by an earthquake.
And all of that is relatively recent. Live long enough in this world and, if you’re fortunate, you will experience thousands of hours of beauty and love. You’ll also be repeatedly shocked by all manner of human suffering and the pain inflicted on strangers far removed from your families and daily lives.
If your conscience can reach the high bar set in the 17th Century by the prose of John Donne — “any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind” — you will still be able to muster sympathy and empathy for others.
It’s hard, though. The world is too much. It’s overwhelming. If you spend too much time thinking about the everyday miseries of others, you could become incapacitated with dread.
So we keep moving, and maybe the faster we move the less time we have for thinking about the absolute fragility and randomness of life and, inevitably, our own mortality. There is probably a direct link between the amount of reported suffering in the real world and the amount of time we spend in the fast-moving digital one.
But today I’ve stepped out of that swift current.
I’m stuck on Wednesday at 12:40 p.m., the time of the car crash on the Baltimore Beltway that killed six road construction workers in an instant.
The more we learned about this — that the car that killed the workers passed through a gap in a protective barrier, something a traffic expert deemed extremely improbable — the more shocking it became.
And deeply tragic: Five men and a woman putting themselves at risk every day to earn a living by fixing a highway we drive and take for granted. Precautions were taken to protect them, and still a car flipped into the work zone and killed them.
How incomprehensibly random, how miserably unfair.
This is when some people ask their god to comfort the kin of those who died and say, “There, but for the grace of God go I.” It’s also when some of us ask: “What God?”
Pardon me for dwelling on this particular tragedy when there are so many around us. I’m awed by the scope of it: six victims, including a father and son from Carroll County and two brothers from Frederick County.
And they were just doing their jobs.
I’m also thinking about the number of times we’ve grumbled about road work that slowed us down — workers in yellow-lime safety vests and hard hats digging holes and pipelines, patching potholes, paving new strips of highway. I’m also thinking about the immigrants among the dead, the people who come here and work hard to build a new life for their families. So many harsh words have been uttered about immigrants, and yet they put on their work boots and gloves to do jobs that fewer and fewer native-born Americans are willing to do.
So random. So unfair.
One June evening in 1999, a Sun editor pulled me away from my son’s rec-league baseball game to help cover the collapse of a pedestrian bridge on the Beltway in Arbutus. A huge backhoe on a flatbed trailer had struck the footbridge at Shelbourne Road, causing it to fall in rush-hour traffic. A 54-year-old man named Robert Taylor died when the bridge struck his Dodge Durango. A few feet from the Durango was a compact car, its front end trapped under the slab. Next to the compact was a sedan, its front end also smashed. The drivers of those vehicles survived. They had escaped death by inches and a split second.
I was sorry to have missed my son’s baseball game, the last of the season, but relieved to get home that night and find him and his sister still awake and available for hugs.
Which brings me to the only advice I can offer. I apologize in advance if you’ve heard it all before, but it’s worth remembering while we’re standing here, out of the fast current: Be engaged in the world, hold dear to friends and family, savor the opportunities each day brings. We should not dwell on grief, but remember that, as we move on, it’s one of the things that unite us as human beings.
We could all be kinder to each other, too.
And then there’s the admonition, also worth repeating, that the late Mike Royko delivered in one of his Chicago newspaper columns many years ago, after his wife died suddenly at home while he was at work: “If there’s someone you love but haven’t said so in a while, say it now. Always, always, say it now.”
