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If I didn't have other things to do tomorrow, I'd drive my old Blazer up some back road into the highest Rocky Mountains until the road ended and a decaying pack-burro trail started, and then I'd walk up the trail until I had a good view of the aspen changing on the sunlit hillsides on the other side of the valley. I'd stay there until word arrived via carrier pigeon that all the 9-1-1 ceremonies, specials, remembrances, vigils, promotions, silent moments, recitals of historic speeches and the like had been completed.
It's as if there was some danger we might forget what happened last year unless we are constantly badgered, hectored, reminded and nagged.
But the process of remembering raises a troubling question: What, exactly, are we commemorating when we remember a human-caused tragedy? In the process, aren't we giving the bad guys -- the terrorists -- precisely what they wanted: to wit, plenty of attention for their cause?
Certainly we try to avert our gaze, and attempt instead to focus on the heroism of the New York firemen who kept going up the stairs when everybody else was heading down, or on the valor of some passengers on the airliner that crashed in Pennsylvania. But stare as one might in those directions, the focus always leads back to the hijackers and their operators.
After years of trying to make a living by putting one
word after another, I think I've figured out why. The
answer is related to a question often put to journalists:
Why do you folks always focus on the bad news and bad
people instead of the good news and the good
people?
The answer is that narrative has its conventions. That is, there's a way to tell a story.
A story needs conflict to be interesting. (If it's not interesting, no one will pay attention to it, and thus it will not be a topic of discussion anyway.)
The conflict can be between humans and nature (a forest fire or a flood, or the epic Moby Dick), but if it's between humans, then we need good guys and bad guys. Further, the customary story line is that all is well in the realm, then the bad guys strike (bank robbers, accountants, CEOs, hackers, terrorists, lobbyists, campaign contributors, etc.). The good guys struggle to a victory, and the realm recovers.
Thus the bad guys are the prime movers -- without them, there is no story. That seems to be how our minds operate, since this narrative structure extends across every culture whose literature I've been exposed to. To put this another way, the Bible would be about a chapter long without Satan.
The victims along the way are generally forgotten as the story is retold. For instance, I'll wager that not one Coloradan in a hundred could identify Israel Swan, James Humphrey, Frank Miller, Shannon Wilson Bell and George Noon. Yet almost all of us identify the bad guy in the story, the man who preyed upon them: Alfred Packer.
Without Packer, they'd be just another party who ventured into the mountains in the winter and never returned. With Packer, they're part of an epic that continues, what with recent forensic examination of the bones of the victims. The bones might tell us whether Packer was telling the truth when he said that when he was away from camp, Shannon Bell killed the others and commenced the cannibalism, and upon his return, he killed Bell in self-defense.
Our tourist industry continues to profit from this
tragedy -- I've lost track of how many Colorado attractions
promote themselves as a place once habited by the only
man in U.S. history to be convicted of cannibalism.
In
truth, Packer was never convicted of cannibalism because
cannibalism has never been a crime in Colorado; he was
convicted of one murder in 1883, and when that was
overturned on a technicality, he was retried in 1886 and
convicted of five counts of manslaughter.
The process will continue this Saturday in Littleton, where Packer is buried, when the Colorado History Group holds another trial (303-795-3950 for particulars, or email me and I'll send you the impossibly long name of the relevant website). I have been subpoenaed to appear as Saguache County Sheriff Amos Wall, from whose custody Packer escaped three months after his first arrest in 1873.
Actually, the escape wasn't Wall's fault. He was out of town, attending district court, when Otto Mears arranged for Packer to escape because his continued presence was giving Saguache a bad name, and Mears had real estate for sale there. Mears would doubtless be shocked to learn that Packer is now a tourist attraction for Saguache.
Maybe it is wrong to remember tragedy this way, by focusing on the bad guys. But right or wrong, we seem to be built that way, and I suspect the 9-1-1 narratives will develop that way, too, no matter where we try to focus our attention tomorrow.
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