Today, I was ten yards away from a guy at the Dome when he went up for
a disc, came down badly, crumpled and stayed down. He whimpered for a
second; very quietly, I thought, for a guy who’s left leg was folded
ninety degrees sideways about a quarter of the way up his shin.
After we’d piled him into an ambulance fifteen minutes
later, the game took a while to get going again. My man
was a visibly shaken. I just wanted to throw for a minute before the
game got going.
Last week I came across
that had some interesting things to say about how people’s reactions
shape how they feel more than the other way around. Nice that there’s
some scientific foundation for it, woo, but when it gets right down
to it I saw a fellow human snap a bone in front of me, and I felt
nothing. Even the act of phrasing it in these self-centered terms is
repugnant. I felt nothing, and I’m concerned and a little bit afraid
of what that says about me, ashamed of myself for even thinking in
those shallow, self-centered terms when a good guy has just broken his
god-damned leg.
You can’t rationalize emotions. I guess it works the other way around,
too; you can’t de-rationalize unresponsiveness either. I wonder which
one’s worse.