In two emergencies I experienced, I see a tendency in myself to interpret sudden dangerous events in terms of other experiences. At work in an office building in Arlington, Virginia, I felt the building shake. Recalling what we had been told to do on Sep. 11, 2001, I said I was going down the stairwell and out of the building. Someone fr…
In two emergencies I experienced, I see a tendency in myself to interpret sudden dangerous events in terms of other experiences. At work in an office building in Arlington, Virginia, I felt the building shake. Recalling what we had been told to do on Sep. 11, 2001, I said I was going down the stairwell and out of the building. Someone from the West Coast said to stay in the building because it was an earthquake. He was right, but I said that the last time I felt our building shake, it was from the explosion of an airliner flown into the Pentagon, so I went outside. This spring, walking along a street in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, I saw a car go up onto the sidewalk on the other side of the street. To me, this was unremarkable. I've seen it too many times. But when the car rolled back into the street and across it and up onto the sidewalk on my side, I suspected that the car was not under control. I was right. The driver either had had a seizure or (what I think was the case) was high. I called 9-1-1, talked to the uncommunicative driver (who climbed out an open window of the car and lay down on the ground) and waited till the police got there. So in both cases I interpreted unusual, dangerous events in terms of my own experience; in the second event, once the situation progressed beyond what I was used to, I recognized it as an emergency.
In two emergencies I experienced, I see a tendency in myself to interpret sudden dangerous events in terms of other experiences. At work in an office building in Arlington, Virginia, I felt the building shake. Recalling what we had been told to do on Sep. 11, 2001, I said I was going down the stairwell and out of the building. Someone from the West Coast said to stay in the building because it was an earthquake. He was right, but I said that the last time I felt our building shake, it was from the explosion of an airliner flown into the Pentagon, so I went outside. This spring, walking along a street in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, I saw a car go up onto the sidewalk on the other side of the street. To me, this was unremarkable. I've seen it too many times. But when the car rolled back into the street and across it and up onto the sidewalk on my side, I suspected that the car was not under control. I was right. The driver either had had a seizure or (what I think was the case) was high. I called 9-1-1, talked to the uncommunicative driver (who climbed out an open window of the car and lay down on the ground) and waited till the police got there. So in both cases I interpreted unusual, dangerous events in terms of my own experience; in the second event, once the situation progressed beyond what I was used to, I recognized it as an emergency.