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.October 29, 2005
Some Places, Disasters Are Certain
In the 1970s I met someone who said she was from Gunnison, Colorado. You know, where that school bus accident was. I did know. Everybody did. It was national news that the September 1971 crash of a bus carrying a high school football team resulted in the death of eight students and one coach and led to the serious injury and maiming of many of the survivors.
Two weeks ago a bus carrying high school students home from a band competition hit a jack-knifed tractor trailer, killing four adults and one student. The MSM picked it up, though that doesnt denote importance the way it once did because the internet format lets lots of smaller stories get carried on multi-page web sites where only a link and blurb need show on the main index. Before, there was only so much time on the 6:00 oclock news and X amount of space in a newspaper and news magazine.
Across the world, in India, there was a passenger train derailment today. Seventeen railcars, 100 dead so far. The account brought to mind an impression I once gained that newspapers in regions like the Mid-east and Central America tell of a major accident nearly every day, either locally or in a nearby country. The death toll is 20, 30, 40 at a time, usually from a bus hit at a train crossing, going off a mountain road, having a head-on with a truck or getting caught in a landslide. The reports I saw didnt make the headlines and I don't recall them being on the front page often.
Consider for a moment something Jay Nordlinger wrote:
On Saturday night, I was in Carnegie Hall, to review the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra. The soloist was the great Swedish mezzo-soprano Sofie von Otter. Believe it or not, she sang a song by Benny Andersson, co-founder of the blockbuster pop group ABBA. This was a song called "At Home," from a musical, about a woman named Kristina who emigrates to America. (This is a musical based on a famous Swedish novel famous to Swedes, I mean.)
Before she sang the song, von Otter explained to the audience that, in the 19th century, some two million were driven from Sweden by famine. Many of these came to America, "this land of opportunity" that's what the singer said. And the Carnegie Hall patrons around me laughed.
You see, they found that phrase "land of opportunity" comical, or ironic, at best. But von Otter appeared to be serious.
I'll never forget when a Chinese actor named John Lone addressed the audience at the Academy Awards. He said something about how nice it was to be in America, where you were free to say what you wanted, or create as you wanted. The audience laughed laughed.
But John Lone wasn't laughing, and neither was Anne Sofie von Otter, and neither are we, right, dear hearts?
Back to accidents. In the first six months of this year, some 2,700 people have died in mining accidents in China. By August the toll had reached 3,400. Accounts say on average 6,000 die each year in Chinas mines, and some claim the number is several times that.
So maybe John Lone had more than careers in mind. Perhaps he was thinking of the whole ball of wax over there, and the numbing, endless deaths of big numbers of ordinary people who were going about their daily lives at the wrong place and time.
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