Notes on Intolerance and Perception

--Part 1--

A Fire Just Destroyed Everything You Own.
Look Into The Camera And Tell Us How That Feels ...

On a Sunday afternoon in October about 12 years ago I drove over to Wendy's to pick up lunch, came back home and found my house on fire. A real fire with ladder trucks already on the scene, with policemen closing off streets and reporters hissing "Who lives there? Is anybody inside?" ... and lots of strangers with their personal cameras watching from the sidewalks hoping to witness and record something tragic for their scrapbooks.

An awful lot can happen in 10 minutes when you're not expecting it.

A female reporter asked me what feeling helpless felt like, made sure she had all her shots, and rushed off with her photographer to file her story. It was almost dark by the time the fire was out (in my eyes, the Anderson Fire Department are Heroes). Then the firemen re-coiled their hoses, climbed on their trucks and drove back to the station. The spectators had dwindled away long before then, probably disappointed because the excitement was over and no one had visibly suffered too much.

I remember the quiet that flooded into the spaces where police and fire department radios had been squawking only seconds before. I remember walking to the front door in the dark once the on-lookers were gone and what it felt like peering inside the smokey, now unfamiliar hallway.

I'd been slapped with the reality that I was homeless and pretty much like the blank faces of disaster victims you see on the news. I was now one of those people who had no possessions, no place to live and nowhere to go. And I remember thinking "What do I do?"

When we see survivors of tornadoes, floods, famine and earthquakes on TV poking through the rubble of their former homes looking for traces of family members or for any scraps from their former lives, the images fade from the screen and vanish soon as the news story ends.

We feel instant relief once a commercial cuts in and replaces tragedy with a blonde in a blouse promising Easy Credit Terms! ... as though the pain we witnessed magically ended as soon as we stopped watching.

If our private realities remain secure, familiar and predictable we might feel entitled to be indifferent spectators to whatever wholesale suffering we see on TV, so long as it's happening somewhere else and to people we've never met ... particularly if those people don't look, talk or dress like us.

It's too emotionally complicated and disturbing to remember that reality sticks around much longer than a video clip, and any difference we'd like to imagine existing between "me" and "the other guy" only depends on who's doing the looking.

--Part 2: The Big Uh-Oh