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A Word from Richard Risemberg for June, 2004On Becoming a Number In every recent year it has happened to over 40,000 human beings in the U.S. alone, but a few weeks ago marked the first time I personally saw it happen.
I was heading out of the office to have lunch when I saw Rosie, who sits nearest the front, gazing out the glass with a quizzical expression. When I stepped out I saw two cars stopped in the street in front of the door, and assumed the usual fender-bender…then I saw the eggplants, cauliflowers, and white plastic bags scattered up and down the street, and under one of the cars. People were running into the street by now, and I joined them. On the far side of the car lay a woman, limp and broken in a slowly spreading pool of blood. Our cell phones sprang to our ears, but before we first heard the sirens howling faintly in the distance, she moved her head slightly once, twice--and then the bleeding stopped.
This was the day before Mother's Day. Over the weekend, a roadside shrine appeared, with candles, flowers, offerings of cakes, an ironic (or perhaps suggestive) road cone, and a US flag. And her Mother's Day cards: one addressed "To My Wife," one to "Mother," and others in Armenian. I could have found out her name easily enough, her history, her children's achievements, but I did not. We should not need to manufacture a personal connection to a victim of tragedy to care that they suffered or are gone. As John Donne said in his famous meditation, "Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind…." The driver who killed this woman--a man about her age, himself Armenian--was sick with sorrow. But he gave the same tired old excuse: "I never saw her." By which he meant, as they always mean, that he never looked. He was in a car, and the car always grants us the delusion that we are not "involved in mankind," that what happens outside the windshield is of little importance, that all the acreage of road that scars our communities exists for the sole convenience of each individual operator of each individual automotive cell. Thus the car diminishes us indeed, one by one as it decimates our community, one by one as it isolates our souls and makes us careless and uninvolved. We who live on become number as we drive--and so diminishes all mankind.
Richard Risemberg Go to A Word from Eric Miller
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The fire crew came, braced her neck, pumped her chest, did what they could, but everybody there knew that she was already dead. The side of her head was crushed and bruised, the gold-dyed hair darkly matted. She had been in her sixties, evidently Armenian, hurrying across the street to her own car to go home and cook for the family. Now she had become a number, one more small black mark on the spreadsheets of the modest holocaust that takes place every day, on any road where cars may go.