Three Minutes to Fort Totten - WaPo re: Metro Crash

[Bertha Venation]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/27/AR2009062702417_pf.html

The operator came over the speaker system and said something about a delay, but his iPod muffled her announcement. The train slowed and accelerated, stopped and started, and all the while he kept reading.

But then, panicked shouts came from the front of the car.

"Oh no. Watch out!" one passenger shouted.

"Oh my God!" screamed another.

Bottoms instinctively grabbed the handrail of the seat in front of him, heard a shrieking crunch of metal, was thrown forward in his seat and saw something coming toward him that at first didn't make any sense. It was a jumble of dust, shoes, glass, seats, carpeting, Metro maps, metal poles and people. It was the front half of Car 1079. But in the first instant, it appeared as a rolling, roaring wave that was coming closer and closer. Carpeting near Bottoms's feet began to rise up and crumple like tissue paper. The wave swept within 15 feet in front of Bottoms . . . 10 feet . . . 7. A studied theologian and an experienced chaplain, he recited a simple prayer.

"God, make it stop."

"God, make it stop."

The wave crested against the seat directly in front of Bottoms, and a cloud of dust enveloped him as the train rocked to a halt. Bottoms stood up, scanned the car and tried to understand what had just happened. Had the train derailed? Had it fallen off a bridge? Had it hit something? He looked in front of him. Where was the floor? He looked up. Where was the roof? Why, as the cloud of dust settled, was he sitting at an incline, staring at a cloudless blue sky, and at another train stretching down the tracks, and at a man on the roof of that train covered in soot and dangling his legs over the side of the car as if perched on the edge of a swimming pool?

[MADem]

1. I dislike these sorts of anecdotes.. Here's why.

They imply that "God" didn't listen to any of the other people, the ones who were killed, but somehow, this "studied theologian and experienced chaplain" had the magic voodoo to get through to "God" when no one else could.

Operator, information, give me Jeeeeeeee--eeeee-sus on the line!

Shit happens. This guy got lucky.

[CBGLuthier]

2. try reading next time

You could not be more wrong about this article. Try a little less pre-judging in your life.

[MADem]

6. Hey, you might try reading, yourself. This is my "opinion."

Go look up the word, bright eyes.

If anyone needs to "pre-judge" a little less, it's not me--check your mirror.

[Bertha Venation]

4. I didn't post the excerpt to endorse god.

I posted it because it is a compelling description of hell happening before a man's eyes.

[MADem]

5. I never suggested you did that. I made it very clear that "I" disliked the anecdote.

I didn't say anything about you, now, did I?

You're not saying that you want only "Me, too" affirmations are you? If that was your desire, you should have said that up front.

I thought you posted it for information and to get "opinion," like most people do when they post articles in this section of the board. Didn't mean to step on your toes, just saying what I felt.

[Bertha Venation]

9. So you did.

:)

[TrogL]

8. I think the point he was trying to make was the simplicity of the prayer

He's a trained theologian who could probably compose a threnody lasting half an hour and the best he could come up with was "make it stop".

[MADem]

10. I dunno--I think the people who were crushed by that mess might have

said some simple prayers too, along the lines of "Jesus H. Christ!" and they weren't helped by them.

It's one of those little "woo woo" stories. It's just my personal feeling, but they irritate me. Perhaps because the same people who are, on the one hand saying that The Big Feller In the Sky "sees" every little sparrow, on the other hand are implying that this same Big Feller sees fit to only stop the carnage when the "trained theologian" pipes up. You could substitute "the little boy who just came from Sunday school and recited the little prayer he learned" and go on and on about the "innocence of the small child" and I'd get that same "Oh, fuck you" feeling.

I do see your point--I just don't like these sorts of cloying stories. While they may give people with "faith" reason to keep on "believing," they, at the same time, suggest that the poor bastards who died just weren't "good enough" for the Big Man--and he couldn't hear their "Dear God in Heavens" or "Sweet Jesus, Save Mes" because they didn't belong to the Reverend Club or know the Magic Code, or something.

That's the screwy thing about many religions. In order to raise someone up, there's often a need to put others down.

[MNDemNY]

3. Was not god, but physics that made it stop.

[Lancer]

7. This is a superbly written story

about a human tragedy. This is an old-fashioned kind of reporting that can only be written after a little legwork has been done to find out something about the injured and the dead -- who they were, why and how they ended up at the same place at the same time. I don't believe that Eli Saslow's intention was anything more than to put a human face on an engineering disaster, and this he did -- admirably.