Happy Independence Day 2010

I was thinking about what to write for our 4th of July celebration, mulling over why we Declared our Independence. Things that sound eerily familiar drove the founders to take this most dangerous step. Such as, taxation without representation, oppressive rules, interference in commerce. I happened to be cleaning up the driveway on Thursday when Sharon Ryan stopped and we started discussing the sorry state of our country and how the people in power today are marching us headlong to socialism and spending us into 2 or 3 generations of servitude. Sharon then told me a story of an experience she had when she and her husband witnessed a very serious accident at Rocky Mountain Airport. Her story is an allegory about what is happening to our country. I suggested she write it up. She did and here it is – THANK YOU SHARON.

Headed for the Fence

I had an interesting experience the other day. My husband and I just happened to be among the 8 or 10 spectators present at Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport when that P2-Neptune air tanker angled off the end of the taxiway and crashed through a chain link fence, coming to rest with its nose in the ground on the far side of 120th Avenue. The event was pretty spectacular, even making national news, but most intriguing to me are the thoughts I’ve had since then regarding the nature of danger and the mechanics of how our minds take its measure; insights that perhaps help explain why people perceive danger so differently, even that of the political kind.

After noting that tankers were flying fire fighting missions between the airport and Rocky Mountain National Park, my husband and I drove out to observe the activity. We were watching a tanker move off the tarmac and down the taxiway with a fresh load of fire retardant when one of the spectators looked to the western sky and said something about catching part of a radio transmission indicating a possible emergency involving the tanker coming in. At about this time we noticed that the newly loaded plane had ceased moving entirely, and we became aware of the faint sound of sirens coming from that direction. We continued to watch the incoming plane as it passed overhead, flew to the far end of the strip, and turned to come in for a landing. When its wheels hit the runway I saw a billow of smoke or dust or tire debris – I wasn’t sure what. Turning off the runway, it continued down the taxiway at a good clip and my curiosity began to turn toward concern. I wondered if it might go straight off the end of the pavement, but aware of my lack of experience piloting a plane, I continued to keep my reservations at bay. Suddenly it angled off onto the grassy median separating the taxiway from the tarmac area. This was definitely something I had never seen before and again I thought something might be wrong, but my explanation at this point became, “Well, maybe the pilot’s just taking a shortcut to the area where the fire retardant is loaded and he’ll change course once he’s on the tarmac.” It was only when the plane was halfway across the tarmac, had not slowed down, had not turned, and contact with the fence was inevitable, that the situation became unequivocally incongruent for me. I could then banish from my mind all alternative explanations for what I was witnessing and finally conclude that something was truly wrong.

I have considered at what earlier points along the way others may have reached the same conclusion. I asked my husband when he knew for certain something was amiss. His longtime interest in aviation, coupled with his experience piloting small aircraft gave him an edge – the plane crossing onto the median was the conclusive piece of evidence for him. Obviously the pilot and copilot knew there was a problem well before that, reportedly a loss of hydraulic fluid, as did the control tower dispatchers, privy to communication with the pilot, but at what point did they each know the extent of the danger, that the plane was going to crash through the fence and that anything was game beyond that? The firefighters, too, had warning of trouble, and the pilot of the waiting aircraft had contact with the tower, but when did those who load the retardant know for certain? What did they clue into? And me – why did it take so long for me to put the pieces together? And what finally, for my mind, made the conclusive piece of evidence conclusive? Besides a suspension of belief attributable to the rarity of this kind of event, I have no experience piloting planes, virtually no experience seeing them in trouble, virtually no experience assessing clues relative to their status, and certainly these factors contributed to my slow response. But I also have an inherent, abstract faith in “pilots”, similar to what I have in “doctors” or “good people”; I simply assume they know what they are doing, have their situation under control, and direct reasonable actions toward reasonable outcomes. It is this faith, especially, which kept my interpretation in check, which kept me from tumbling to the seriousness of the situation. I gave the pilot the benefit of every doubt – I invested him with authority, competence. I recognized trouble only when my own critical mass of incongruity was reached, and it was reached only when I was certain the plane was going through the fence. At that moment I recognized the event as a crisis; at that moment the event became spectacular.

Perhaps you can see where I am going with this relative to the political danger that many of us perceive our country to be in today. Many of us feel we have seen enough to conclude that, unless we change course, the plane will crash through the fence. We see, for example, the relentless centralization of power and the concurrent curtailing of individual and economic freedoms. We are aghast at the copious amounts of money being spent and with no glimmer of restraint in sight. We perceive the antagonism directed toward big business and the ongoing denial of the value big business provides to our society. We see disdain for individual empowerment, the bedrock endowment of this nation. We see the inability of our current leaders to objectively evaluate reality and deal with it effectively. We see our prosperity being squandered.

We see these signs and more and can only wonder what additional evidence others can possibly need to likewise see that the plane is headed for the fence. But, like me watching events unfold at the airport, they simply don’t sense the danger yet. They do not attribute significance to the above concerns. They have faith in the pilot. They believe he must know what he is doing and that his actions must be directed toward desirable, attainable outcomes. They have not yet been faced with their unequivocal incongruity. Spectacular simply hasn’t happened yet.

Sharon Ryan
Broomfield, CO
July 3, 2010