Astromariner
Going the right way for a smacked bottom
posted
Coincidentally enough, given the coruscating debates currently raging about speed and dangerous driving on That Thread in rants, I read a strange little article in The Metro today. It was headed “Briton Dies in Athens Tragedy” and was about some luckless person working there during the games, who got knocked down and killed yesterday by a member of the Danish Olympic squad driving an SUV. The thing that struck me about the story was the driver’s comment when interviewed for Danish television that night: he said “I feel no guilt”. Admittedly, he had apparently been doing the speed limit, and the guy who was killed just stepped out in front of him giving him no time to swerve or brake, but I’m having some trouble understanding the mindset of someone who, during the course of one day, could kill another human being in the morning, and profess himself to have completely dealt with the mind-meltingly enormous horror of that fact by tea-time. I’m not condemning him, and I’m sure there’s more to his current state of mental and spiritual wellbeing than this one bald statement has given me to suppose, but still.
I remember doing the fainting game at first year in school. I expect some of you will have tried a variation of this: it basically requires you to crouch down on the floor, breath in and out very quickly for a minute or so, then stand up suddenly whilst squeezing your neck and holding your breath, in the hope of inducing unconsciousness. Looking back, it seems like an extremely odd way to spend a lunch break but we thought it was fun at the time. Although I never managed to faint, I taught a friend of mine at a birthday party how to apply the technique, and he duly went off to school on Monday morning, and tried a spot of impromptu fainting with his friends, one of whom mastered it immediately. Unfortunately, he happened to be standing at the top of a grassy embankment at the time. He fell down it, tumbling head first onto the concrete paving below, and spent a number of months in hospital recovering from injuries which nearly killed him.
The chain of cause and effect which connected me to what happened was immediately, horribly apparent. As you might imagine, I got into quite a lot of trouble from a number of very angry grown-ups, and during the boy’s agonisingly slow recovery I carried an ever-present image of him in my mind (constructed from a potent combination of episodes of Casualty and my own worst imaginings) connected to tubes and beeping machines, clinging feebly onto life in some grim hospital corner. He did recover, and for all I know (best not to dwell here) he is in fine fettle as I type this, but I still feel residual dregs of guilt some 15 years later. So how come this Danish dude gets off the hook so easy?
Anyway. I was wondering if any of you had inadvertently (or otherwise) done someone harm and how badly (or otherwise) you felt about it afterwards. Also you could talk about guilt and the nature of responsibility and stuff. Or dangerous playground activities you used to do.
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posted
There are things I've said and done in the past, the consequences of which have long since faded for everyone involved, that still cause me spasms of guilt and shame to think about. I'm talking stuff I did maybe sixteen years ago that no-one else could possibly remember, that still make me wince. The thing is with most (all?) of these things is that pretty much no-one else in the world knows about any of them. But I still feel bad about it.
I also don't reckon the Danish guy is really feeling the full effects yet. I imagine he doesn't feel any guilt now but it may catch up with him. Or, maybe he is just zen enough to say "there's nothing I could have done". Who knows?
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posted
Maybe the language/cultural differences also play a small part in explaining his comment.
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Astromariner
Going the right way for a smacked bottom
posted
Yes, that's true of course. Perhaps in Danish, the concept of guilt is more associated with being directly culpable for something, rather than the broader "if only" connotations it has in our language.
posted
Guilt. Confession. This memory still makes my fingertips tingle with the hot blood of shame (I have an excess of shame, currently).
When I was younger (a lot younger) I coaxed my brother into stealing a bar of chocolate. From a health food shop. He shoved it down the front of his trousers and we toddled off with our mother. Of course it slipped down and my mother had to investigate why he was clutching his crotch in a suspicious way. And the chocolate fell out and she was verr cross and dragged him back to the shop to apologise and hand it back to the owner.
'But Fran told me too!' Wailing, red-faced, tear-streaked.
Did I admit to my part in this crime? No. I stood and shuffled and tutted and went very pink.
I've felt guilty about many things in my time, but this episode's been burned onto my memory (probably shaped the moral fibres of my brain) for a good fifteen years. Probably more. I feel a bit heady from that confession. And sick.
-------------------- the more brilliant her smile, the closer she always seemed to disaster Posts: 1057
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God, I'd forgotten about it until now. Not that I tried to forget it, I think. I don't feel especially guilty about it any more. He was ok. Which was lucky, I guess. At the time, I thought I'd damaged him way beyond repair. They rushed him off to hospital and I just sat in the living room feeling deeply wicked and weirdly glazed over.
It was a very Owen Meany moment. Of course I didn't know who Owen Meany was at the time. Might have helped. Don't know how we came to be playing something so stupid, or what the game even was. Suppose we must've just invented it on the spot. There was my best friend, and my second best friend, and there was me. Capering in a field near our street. When we discovered a scattering of ... I dunno, just junk. Like a just-tipped skip. Old chairs and cabinets and appliances and car parts and stuff. And a wheel trim. Is that what you call it? The metal disc part of a car wheel. Yeah, I think that's the name.
And we decided what an excellent idea it would be to spread out around the field and throw pieces of junk at each other! Oh yes that was the best idea ever, let's do it, come on. So we did that for a bit and it was fine and uneventful and safe until I picked up the wheel trim and frisbeed it, halfheartedly, in the direction of my best friend. And as the disc was spinning towards him, he stood up from where he'd been crouched in the grass and looked round to see me, and the wheel trim veered into his face. He crumpled. That's the word. Crumpled.
My other friend ran over to see if he was ok. I didn't move. When he reared up from the ground - and I am not joking - his face was just this vast mask of blood. He put his hands to his face and they came away running red. And he was screaming. Fucking braying.
So you can imagine how his mother must have felt when we helped him into the house like that. I can imagine too, but I don't really remember. What I do remember is sitting in the living room with my mum and dad, waiting to learn just how serious a thing I'd done. And it was horrid. I felt wicked, malicious, violent. I felt everyone else must think so too.
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