Wreck
My worst car wreck was on September 14th, 2001. It’s one of those memories I can replay with exquisite detail: the sound of the crash, my head bouncing off of the door post, the crunch as my front wheels literally broke off the axles. It was absolutely my fault. I pulled out of a driveway onto busy State Route 16 on a Friday night at 5:45 pm, the height of rush hour. I looked left, saw nothing, then looked right and saw my opening to turn left across the road.
As I pulled out, I glanced left once more. There wasn’t even time to say the proverbial, “Oh Shit”, before the car hit my driver’s side door. They were going about fifty or so, lucky for me in a compact car. I was in my “new to me” blue GMC Suburban, a veritable tank. Anything smaller, and I would have been seriously injured.
Aftermath
After the accident, I got out the passenger side door and found myself standing in a pile of beer cans. They weren’t mine – maybe the other driver’s? I wasn’t sure, I was more worried about him and his family. He was relatively unhurt, burned by the airbags on the insides of his arms. His wife was bruised on her face. Their young child, standing up in the backseat, was thrown at the dash. He had a split lip that would require stitches, but seemed OK besides that.
We stopped traffic on Broad Street at rush hour on a Friday night. Not surprisingly, a crowd soon gathered, and eventually the local police arrived. I told them everything I remembered, looking at but not seeing the on-coming vehicle, then pulling out in front of him. And I made sure the officer understood that the accident was totally my fault, that the other driver did nothing wrong. I distinctly remember hearing a spectator in the crowd: “…That’s the most honest thing I’ve ever heard”. Maybe it was his beer.
Injuries
They took the kid in an ambulance with his parents. I was living alone at the time and when they asked if I wanted to get checked out at the hospital, I said that I would. The world was still ringing, I wasn’t sure how banged up my head was. But the worst injury was still to come. Working in the ambulance were some of my former high school students. They said they needed practice putting in IV’s. So I got a few, and the next day had the dark bruises to show for it. After that, my memory isn’t so clear. The other thing I distinctly recall was telling the ER Doctor that I wanted a blood alcohol test. He said, “You’re not drunk”, and I replied “I know, but I want that on record”. I was still thinking of all those beer cans.
It was my forty-fifth birthday, and it was three days after 9-11. Looking back, the toll of that week: learning and teaching about the Taliban, Al Qaeda, the melting point of steel beams, and helping my students through the trauma of airplanes striking buildings, definitely impacted me. I was mentally exhausted by the end of the week. Maybe that’s why I didn’t see the car coming. And I was distracted, getting birthday wishes from my parents on the phone at the time.
Slow Speed Collision
I’ve been writing about my experiences, politics, and our world for the past five years. And I’m starting to wonder; has the cumulative effect of the shock of a nation where nearly half of the voters are willing to support a candidate like Donald Trump caused that same kind of mental distraction? Add the very real trauma of the Insurrection, of seeing the attack on the Capitol and the Nation, and I find I’m struggling with tolerance. I’ve looked back at my writings for the past few weeks and I’m worried. Have I become inflexible? For a man who prides himself as seeing all the grays between black and white, my vision and attitude are polarized. I feel a crash coming on.
Civil War
Donald Trump, and those who support him, were willing to overthrow the Constitution to achieve their individual power and money. They, all of them, are at a point beyond forgiveness, or to put it in religious terms, beyond redemption. I envision them as the same as those leaders of the secession movement before the Civil War, Edmund Ruffin or Howell Cobb. Ruffin, who wrote essays advocating slavery, demanded that the South secede and fired one of the first shots against Fort Sumter. Cobb, a former Speaker of the House of Representatives and Secretary of Treasury, led the Secession Congress and became a Major General in the Confederate Army. For both of them, there should be no redemption.
Ruffin determined his own fate at the end of the war by committing suicide. But Cobb, and many others, were redeemed. After the War Cobb received a pardon. He was even eligible to run for Congress again, though he didn’t (others did, like Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens). But Cobb became a strong opponent of Reconstruction, speaking all across the South, even as one of those who caused the need for Reconstruction in the first place.
Search for Gray
And for those leaders of the Trump Administration, who plotted at the White House and in a nearby room of the Willard Hotel to thwart the US Constitution and the will of the people; today there is not only redemption, but vindication. They continue to plan their return to power. And those that enabled their treachery remain empowered in Congress, and by right-wing media.
I am struggling to find the gray. I can understand some of my friends who went to Washington to “Stop the Steal”. They were misled; told by their trusted leaders that the “Revolution” was against them. But that leadership knew better. And we are getting clearer information about what went on. We know that the crowd was aimed and fired at the Capitol, and violence was a foreseeable and even desired outcome.
So it’s hard to look at Josh Mandel here in Ohio, or other Republican candidates throughout the nation who have “committed to Trumpism”, as legitimate seekers of office, rather than usurpers of the Constitution. I can find no “gray” in that. They allowed Trumpism to “happen”, and they have neither asked for or received absolution for the trauma our nation is still going through. They are like Cobb and Ruffin, unreconstructed. How can they possibly be allowed to run?
Frustration
And the second issue I’m struggling with is those who refuse to get the Covid vaccine. They don’t ignore the science – they deny it. And they base their decision on their own set of “alternative facts” (at least Kelly-Ann Conway had the courtesy to disappear). It’s being fed to them through pod-casts and the “alternate” media. When confronted with the “real” data, they deny-deny-deny. It becomes all about a giant world “plot” to enrich big Pharma and the government. Need an example? Check out Covid infected Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rogers, following the medical protocol of that known “viral specialist”, podcaster Joe Rogan. It’s disappointing.
And it’s maddening – that normally reasonable people, capable of high levels of research and thought, are choosing information sources so poorly. But they demand that I respect their choices as “valid”: “You do you, I’ll do me”. The problem is, “you doing you” is hurting the rest of us.
Polio
Thank goodness my parents didn’t think that way. As polio, infantile paralysis, was burning through children in the suburbs in the 1950’s, two vaccines were developed to stop its spread. The first, by Dr. Salk in Ann Arbor, Michigan, was an injection. The second, by Dr. Sabin who lived down the street from us in Cincinnati, was oral. Both prevented the disease and removed the specter of iron braces and iron lungs that made parents lock their children inside throughout the summer.
Mom and Dad took us to Dr. Sabin’s house. He served the vaccine out his back patio door. I suppose we were test subjects – but my parents, like many, were so worried about polio they would do almost anything to prevent it. There were mistakes, including a bad batch of Dr. Salk’s vaccine. But there wasn’t a “movement”, an anti-polio vaccine effort. The disease was so much worse than the possibility of mistakes, people accepted the risks.
But today many are somehow willing to accept as inevitable a disease that has killed three-quarters of a million of us. And the argument that their infection, while it might be mild, put others at serious and maybe even fatal risk, doesn’t seem to matter. It’s hard to “keep my head” in those discussions. Hard to accept their ideas even for the purpose of dialog. It’s hard not to lose my temper, and say exactly what I think – they are being played for someone else’s benefit. And that their decisions might impact and kill others.
Prayer
There Is a friend of mine who worked with the toughest kind of emotionally disturbed children. She often quoted the “Serenity Prayer”:
“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”
I’m not a prayerful man, and I am struggling to determine what I can and cannot change. There’s not much likelihood of serenity in my head anytime soon. But I do need to find the capacity to see “the gray” once again. It may not lead to serenity, but it might allow me, “…To keep my head about me, when all others are losing theirs” (Kipling). In our current political world, that might be as close to “grace” as we can get.
