Bad Decisions
Today I found out a friend died. I found out in a scattered, GenTech way when I read an email that was responding to several other emails that I hadn't read because they had ended up in my spam folder. The first email I read about Liberty didn't say exactly that he was dead but I knew something really bad had happened. I patrolled my spam folder, reading backwards until I found the first message that confirmed that he had died in a hit and run. I later did a web search and found an article that graphically described the accident in more detail than I wanted. Liberty was hit in a fast food parking lot while throwing some food away; the car that hit him dragged him a while at a slow speed while his friend ran beside it yelling for them to stop. The driver panicked and sped ahead, running over and killing Liberty.
Liberty was a fourth-year PhD student like me, and we taught in the same writing program. He studied how people make decisions, and I can't help but wonder about what motivated this driver to make such a terribly bad decision, one that ended the life of a smart, funny, engaged young man. My impulse is to think, if I were in that situation, of course I would stop, I would immediately want to help the person, right? So is there something less human about a person who doesn't react like that? Do we blame it on the media, on the desensitizing we've all undergone as a result of the endless barrage of violence that we ingest nightly through the many incarnation of CSI, Law & Order, on the nightly news, at the summer blockbusters and so forth? I think that's an oversimplification. I think it's very likely the driver, and the passenger who urged him to "go, go, go," were detached from what was happening; but I also think they were very afraid. Fear is so pervasive now, perhaps more so than violence, that maybe these kids imagined they'd be arrested or deported, or thought about the financial costs of being sued, and the fear of the punishing bureaucracy was so overwhelming that they forgot about the life that lay beneath them and focused only on preserving their own.
Of course the irony is that had they stopped, Liberty would have lived and the punishment they would have faced would have been much less severe. I hope when they're found, someone asks them why they made such a bad decision.
Liberty was a fourth-year PhD student like me, and we taught in the same writing program. He studied how people make decisions, and I can't help but wonder about what motivated this driver to make such a terribly bad decision, one that ended the life of a smart, funny, engaged young man. My impulse is to think, if I were in that situation, of course I would stop, I would immediately want to help the person, right? So is there something less human about a person who doesn't react like that? Do we blame it on the media, on the desensitizing we've all undergone as a result of the endless barrage of violence that we ingest nightly through the many incarnation of CSI, Law & Order, on the nightly news, at the summer blockbusters and so forth? I think that's an oversimplification. I think it's very likely the driver, and the passenger who urged him to "go, go, go," were detached from what was happening; but I also think they were very afraid. Fear is so pervasive now, perhaps more so than violence, that maybe these kids imagined they'd be arrested or deported, or thought about the financial costs of being sued, and the fear of the punishing bureaucracy was so overwhelming that they forgot about the life that lay beneath them and focused only on preserving their own.
Of course the irony is that had they stopped, Liberty would have lived and the punishment they would have faced would have been much less severe. I hope when they're found, someone asks them why they made such a bad decision.
posted by Ms. at 11:25 PM
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