It Happens
Glenn Reynolds:
MOURN AND MOVE ON
It was terrible news.
But I felt almost immediately that this wouldn’t
be another Challenger in terms of its mass emotional impact. There are a
lot of reasons for this. The first is that we’ve already had our Challenger
and most people now feel that we overreacted, taking too long to start flying
again, and worrying more than we should about absolute safety. The second
is that, post 9/11 and with a war looming, we’re a bit tougher about tragedies.
We should fix the problem and get on with things, with a minimum of tear-jerking.
Maybe we're all soldiers now—it can happen pretty fast.
The Right Stuff Way
Two years out
of college, I started losing buddies to enemy fire and to military aviation
itself, where small errors compound fast. Interestingly, none of us walked
around in the kind of dramatic funk you'd think from watching TV. Instead,
we became Buddhists. Oh, none of us knew we were Buddhists, even though
we were avoiding Asian bullets
and mountains.
What we did is focus on doing
things the Right Way and never thinking about the threat.
Doing things the right way
isn't as dramatic as talking about who has the Right Stuff,
but it's what actually goes on in military aviation. Whatever the threat,
the challenge in military aviation is to remember all the right procedures
(most
of which
are reflexive)
and to not let your
feelings about a threat overwhelm your ability to perform. The threat is
never the enemy, it's error. You can't control the enemy so thinking about
him is a colossal waste of time. What you can do is follow the procedures
that have been fashioned from the mistakes of thousands of dead aviators
and close calls. More accurately, you don't actually do the right thing,
you avoid doing the wrong thing. Aviation in general and military
aviation particularly is based on benos,
as in, "There'll be no more of this, and there'll be no more of
that."
(It turns out that doing the right thing requires an odd blend of confidence
and humility. Confidence so you know you're capable of doing the right thing,
and humility so you know that the fatal error is present in the slightest inattention.
For a dramatic example of
the role of error in aviation, consider the story of the greatest air disaster
in history, where a publicly acclaimed, right
stuff kind of guy impetuously killed himself and 537 others, and didn't
even have to leave the ground to do so.)
Glenn Reynolds' point is that, like all warriors, we have better things to
do than to dwell on the casualties of action, since now we're all in
the
mix ourselves. The threat is unimportant. What's important is that each of
us do our assignment well whatever that assignment is. What we think about
our circumstance is the
stuff of daytime soaps. What matters is whether we're doing our assignment
as well as we've been trained and as we're capable. As we used to say, "It
doesn't matter whether you crash or not. What matters is whether you strike
the ground at
the proper angle of attack."
It sounds like the old stiff-upper-lip advice, doesn't it? That's because
it is. Being a Buddhist or warrior is not some airy-fairy new age indulgence.
It's a matter of clarity of purpose and a sense that one matters but that fear
does not.
Get Over Yourself!
On 9-11 plus 4, I was at an outdoor cafe in Philadelphia, where the mood
was as subdued as you'd imagine. Some young people at the next table hailed
a passing
cyclist, who paused to chat with them. Shortly thereafter, I heard the young
man say, "It's not fair! This is supposed to be the best time of my
life! I'm just so depressed I don't know what to do." I can't say
if he lacked the right stuff, but he sure seemed to be approaching his reality
the
wrong way.
Since soldiers, aviators and Buddhists acquire detachment from the threat,
why don't Americans develop a cultural bias for that healthy kind of detachment?
Why worry about what's
unlikely,
when you can do something that directly improves what's here-and-now? Were
we to collectively embrace the wisdom of the warrior, we too would sluff off
the distractions that cause us not to be present to the important work we each
have. Those distractions compete with the benos that
must guide our actions—specific, known mistakes of those who've gone
before us.
The Enemy
Detachment seems the opposite of what we might call the jitters. What causes
jitters? Any emphasis on what might go wrong rather than known ways to avoid
past mistakes. The enemy is any force that emphasizes those worries.
The
troika whose product is the jitters is the alliance of organized religion,
politics and the media. In a world of important
work and vital compassion, we humans invite distraction when we listen to
voices whose agenda is to
describe threats so terrifying that we dare not ignore them. Their livelihood
is the rape of our minds, our innocence and our capacity
to do the right thing in our real lives—you know: the ones we conduct
with each other.
A perfect example is the Homeland Security Threat. When we're told that we're
in danger but we're not told what to do to protect ourselves, then we're
being treated like children. If someone purports to be in charge but can't
say how you can contribute to the challenge except by paying attention to them,
then that person's goal is our attention, our praise, our eyeballs, our vote.
For sure, he hasn't anything useful to say to us.
5:49:09 PM 
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