I finally picked up a newspaper and decided to write about something that has very little to do with myself. Instead of writing another bleeding heart article, I’m going to attempt to comment on an insane car accident that I had absolutely no part in. Sunday morning proved to be quite interesting for motorists attempting to travel on the Long Beach Freeway in California. Early in the morning, a dense fog obscured vision and contributed to a pile-up of a total of 194 cars that participated in two huge collisions, several hundred yards apart.
“Visibility was down to about 50 feet in heavy fog when the chain-reaction crashes began just before 7 a.m.,” said Patrol Officer Joseph Pace when interviewed by USA Today. “Forty-one people were injured, nine of them critically,” he said.
Rob Ziegler, who was in the crash, said, “You could hear all the crashing and the banging. You could feel your car moving, knowing that other cars are still hitting you.”
Barring the injuries and property damage resulting from this colossal collision, the overall idea that this type of wreck is possible is unreal. It is the ultimate chaotic post-modern occasion. It marked an instance where laws were thrown to the birds. It wasn’t a hate crime or an attack; it was just one of those random things that happened and affected hundreds of people. Imagine the chaos that ensued-it’s a scary thought.
I bet that people started praying during this wreck. I bet some of them decided to change the way they interact with their families, lovers or co-workers. I bet some people decided to change big things in their lives, such as their attitudes, their jobs and their bad habits.
Perhaps this type of speculation is unwarranted; I’ll agree to that. But the singular coincidence of a crash involving 200 cars is a symbol of our human inability to control what happens in this world.
It’s like that scene in “Magnolia” when millions of live frogs rain down from the sky. Millions of frogs just fall and fall and fall, crashing into things, breaking through windows and hurting people. That scene was unpredictable and uncanny-and brilliant. It summed up the author’s theme for the film-that things just happen, and the only things we can control are our reactions to events.
I don’t know why the Long Beach story and the frog scene so quickly struck me as similar occurrences. Maybe it’s because I’ve been in my share of automobile accidents, and I understand the effect that they can have on your psyche. Instances like the frog scene just don’t happen, true. But who would think that 200 cars could get in the same wreck? You’d think that they’d have seen the other cars or heard about it on the radio.
The sheer disorder of it all is amazing. The fact that hundreds of people shared in the same mind-boggling instance is thought-provoking. Maybe it was similar to the things that we felt in September of 2001, minus the conspiracy theories.
While I refuse to say anything about that tragedy (It’s all been said. Who can say more?), I think that maybe I can comment on the car wreck. Maybe it had a positive effect on some people and reminded them that an inability to control things isn’t only a wartime occurrence. Maybe it reminded them that chaos is a lot closer to us than we think, and that it doesn’t hinge only upon evil tragedies but also on the idea that we don’t really control what we think we do.
We get so caught up in the surface of things, i.e., I drive my car safely, I do my work well, I treat people decently, etc. Yet even these things are subjective. How many of us truly know the truth of our actions or accept our possible inconsistency? What a frightening and liberating thought.
Joy Murphy is a senior English major.