Date: April 14th, 2010
I've been in a couple fender-benders in my life. And by been in, I mean that I was in the car. And by I was in the car, I mean that my mom likes to drive into things. Actually, to be fair to her, its more that she gets attacked by other cars. I remember riding with her in Connecticut and she made the mistake of actually signaling before switching lanes. Now, in California, Michigan and everywhere else we've lived, putting on your turn signal means "hey, I am letting you know that I intend to shift lanes... please let me in". In Connecticut, it means "I'm not from around here". Needless to say, as soon as she put that little light on, the driver in the other lane decided to make herself comfortable in our blind spot. You know, for kicks.
That being said, while I've seen accidents before, I've never been in a position where I felt the need to call 911. I've seen tons of fender-benders. The worst thing to come out of those is an expensive paint touch up and a bogus whiplash charge. When I was much younger I saw a couple of more serious accidents, but being a child, the idea that I would have some responsibility to the driver in those accidents didn't really sink in.
The worst one I ever saw was on a highway in (guess where) Connecticut. There was a woman trying to get onto the highway and an 18-wheeler decided she didn't get to do that. The truck driver sped up and side swiped her, essentially running her car off the road before driving away. I think I was eight or nine at the time and the fact that my mom pulled over, made sure the woman was ok and called in the information she could find about that truck basically completely escaped me. I simply wasn't old enough to contemplate our inherent responsibility to each other as members of the same society.
When I got into college and then law school, a lot of the classes I took talked about the bystander effect. The short version of it is that when a large group of people sees a crime or tragedy, no one will call it it because everyone will assume that someone else already has. There was a particularly tragic case of the bystander effect in New York in the 1960's. A woman was killed outside a huge apartment building and many of the residents told police later that they heard her calling for help, but assumed someone else would respond. That paragraph was such a downer, wasn't it? But it was important that I explain the bystander effect to y'all because its one of those lessons that really sank in for me.
I think everyone has a lesson like that. Sometimes they're more serious and other times, not so much. It comes from having a life lesson that someone else learned the hard way drilled into you over and over and over again. The one I got from my parents growing up was 'never put metal or bones in the disposal'. I have deep and abiding respect for the proper treatment of disposals. I don't know why that one stuck when "clean your room", "straighten up after yourself" and "don't procrastinate" were all left behind to languish, but such is life.
In any case, after seven years of professors reminding me over and over that people don't necessarily call 911 if they assume others will have done so... I decided I needed to make absolutely sure that it happened if it needed to. Despite holding that philosophy for quite some time, it hadn't been tested really at all. Well, as I was driving out to Hiller's the other day (I adore Hiller's, but that's another story for another day), I saw a car that had run up onto the divider between the two directions on the highway. It was clearly pretty recent as there were not emergency personnel anywhere around and I couldn't tell as I drove by if the driver was hurt.
I had that split second thought that everyone gets -- I'm sure someone has already called this in. But, I decided to call it in anyway for the same reason I'll never put chicken bones in the disposal. There is some deep, subconscious part of me that is utterly convinced that the world will end if I break that rule. I like to call it OCD of convenience. I was pleased to find that someone had already called it in, which the 911 operator confirmed when I got through. It was the first time I really did feel that societal sense of responsibility. It just didn't feel right to drive by without calling it in.
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