A matter of life and death

You can tell by the stark, gray text that appears at the top of Boston.com, that something is up, that news is breaking. It's both frightening and exciting, the unformatted and mostly unedited text that looks like something you could've whipped up in Notepad. What is important enough that the Globe editors would throw this eyesore onto their page without taking any time to go over it?

Yesterday, it was an accident. A scaffolding collapse at a construction site. Crushed cars. Three people dead. 136 Boylston Street. It didn't sound familiar. 136. I knew the Little Building was 80. I knew the Walker Building was 120. That's terrible, I thought. I clicked the full article for more info, and when I read "Emerson College" and "new dorm," the whole thing went from being terrible to oh shit.

And that's when I thought of the man in the car, on whom a crane had fallen as he was driving along, probably killing him instantly. He was a doctor; his body wore scrubs. I thought of his family, who at that point probably didn't even know he was dead. And I thought of the school, my school, and its blighted new dorm.

But none of this until I knew it was Emerson. That's what grabbed me. That's what changed this news from a random headline to something that ruined my day.

Last week someone I went to high school with died, and to be honest I didn't feel anything. I was criticized for a lack of compassion -- I had known this kid -- but it just felt like a headline to me. Sure, it was terrible. Of course it was. And I was sure his family was upset. But just because I had a vague recollection of what these people looked like, from soccer games when I was ten, that didn't make my heart go out any more than when you hear of a random shooting on the news.

In contrast, a few weeks ago a boy checking the mail got hit by a car and killed. He was wearing Heelies, the Heelies I raved about in the early days of this blog. Gliding along and then bam. I cried reading the article.

Why does some tragedy hit us, and some rolls right past, and some even seems funny? Sometimes, does a part of us, a part we would never ever admit to having, think that maybe, just maybe, some people deserve it? That our emotions can be let off the hook by the idea that, hey, they had it coming? Who deserves it? Someone who overdoses on illegal drugs -- do they kind of deserve it? More than a freckle-faced boy who gets hit by a car? A Haitian immigrant fording the Gulf of Mexico in a washtub -- if he drowns, does he kind of deserve it? More than a middle-class husband with a couple of kids in his backyard pool in your town? Your heart would go out to one more than the other. Sunday on the news: three people were shot in a drive-by in Roxbury. Next story: an eight-week-old baby needs a new heart. The heart story won me over. The poor baby. Because the part I won't admit to having thinks, Roxbury is Roxbury; that stuff happens.

What determines who gets, if not our compassion, then our attention? I felt worse about New Orleans than I did about the tsunami. Why? Who gets our attention? Our own nationality first? Our own race next? Our own class third? And then what? Do we dish out compassion based on how much the victim deserved it?

Is there a magic formula for what can shake you up the most? Something you relate to most?

Does it all come down to how much of ourselves we see in a tragedy? The more we see, the more we let ourselves feel? Do we let down the wall between ourselves and the headlines? Maybe the wall isn't the default -- maybe a shared human experience is enough to make us relate to everyone. Maybe the wall is something we actively build for our own self-preservation. How could we get through the day if we thought about everyone? 5,000 people killed in an earthquake in Iran. Up goes the wall.

A man in a car, a doctor, driving along; and suddenly, a falling crane. Everyone drives along. You drive along. The wall crumbles.

When I was walking home from work yesterday, I couldn't not see the remains of the accident. The trees in the Common are still winter-bare, and through them, there was the new dorm missing its scaffolding. All of the 5:30 dog-walking people were facing it, every person, in ones and twos and small groups, scattered throughout the Common between the hill and Charles Street where the fake snow once was. Every one of them facing in the same direction, looking at that new dorm.

Across the city, in Roxbury, shots rang out in another drive-by. Four passersby killed. The dog-walking people saw this on the news when they got home, and over dinner, it was the dorm accident that they talked about.