Traffic
On our way to Pizza Hut with our two-year-old son after a long day at work, we drove by the stretch of the Lloyd Expressway where the accident that killed three young men happened last week. Like a lot of people that day, we saw the rescue truck’s blinding lights, the smashed car, the rain-slickened road stretching reflections of police lights. We were driving east the night of the crash, and the westbound side of the expressway was shut down and detoured. People going east saw what had happened and could start thinking about their children in the backseat. Most of the people going west were probably in a hurry and wondered what the holdup was. On this night, though, I told my wife what I’d heard early that morning.
In the gym locker room, two men were talking. One of them had found graffiti on a warehouse he owns and now had to get it off or paint over it. Then he said what we’ve all heard before — kids these days, they don’t care about anything anymore. But haven’t older people always said this about young people, and isn’t it a cowardly thing to say? Worse, this man was upset about the attention those boys’ deaths were getting — can you imagine, the front page of the local paper? The other man said that they were probably speeding. Probably. So? We see at least three accidents a week near the very stretch of that fatal accident, mostly harmless rear-enders during jams. Still, couldn’t it happen to anyone? My wife said all she could think about was that those boys were someone’s babies. Someone gave birth to them, held them when they cried, put them to bed, watched them grow and change. Now those parents are suffering unimaginable grief.
I think I see the man’s point. We’re apt to ascribe heroism to people who die shockingly; but I left the locker room that morning feeling uneasy, as if I’d heard a nasty secret I shouldn’t have. It sounded to me as if we shouldn’t expect anything better from young people, so why make a fuss? My wife also said something that a friend of hers once told her: When you have kids, you are more compassionate toward your students. We are both university professors, so we see young men and women every day around the same age as the victims of that accident. Our students are sometimes oblivious and careless, unaware of what they are saying or doing; but isn’t that part of being young? In any case, they are also granted that same freedom to make mistakes that we adults — who can also be careless — grant ourselves. If you’ve been in a car crash, after all, what saved your life? Luck, probably. Maybe you hit the brakes soon enough to avoid a serious collision. As adults, we probably have learned a little bit more than teenagers about avoiding life’s dangers, but we are not qualified to dismiss their lives.
While we were eating pizza and our son drank his milk, we of course talked about him, so full of promise, so fragile. Then my wife wondered if those boys had just come from this place before the crash. Had this waitress taken their order? Is that why, two days later, it’s so quiet in here, with so few people?
Our own family has had its bout of trauma this past year, nowhere nearly as bad as the families of those boys, but having been well through it all has brought this local tragedy into relief for me, especially after hearing the conversation between those two men. As we head into the Hanukah and Christmas season and we begin to buy gifts and visit with our families and friends, I think about those two lanes of traffic, one so close to the suffering, hushed by it, and the other impatient, ignorant, unable to extend beyond itself, something like two opposing forces in our own hearts. My wife and I realized that we can’t really do much for those boys or for their families’ suffering, but what we can all do, at the very least, is not blame others, even those we do not love, for their suffering.
