What Happened to Compassion?

This post is sadly not exactly a funny one, so if you’re looking for me screwing around, you might want to skip on to a different one.

Glad you be safe. everything is an event with you – Text from OFLJ

I know my diligent fan base has been upset because I haven’t had anything up in the last few days, and don’t worry stalker, it’s going to be ok. (Seriously, I keep getting calls from some 302 number that likes to hang up whenever I pick up, or leave me messages of my own voicemail recording. Now I know how Conan O’Brien felt when he had a stalker. Honored.)

This weekend I decided to go home because I’m slowly drifting towards madness, and I had the weekend off due to previous plans falling through. (By drifting I mean I’m already there, you guys all knew that though didn’t you.)

Thursday morning I wake up, with a halo hanging on my four post bed (Damn you Sugar Ray. I think that means something dirty, but I never knew, and now I’m too old to ask and I’m just forced to sing along with confidence, pretending like I know what is going on. Story of my life) and I decided to pick a random train home.

Right as Amtrak got me to Philadelphia, about twenty minutes from my final destination of Wilmington (home of the hit rapper Wil Ming Ton (that’s me)) I hear something odd and the train labors to a halt.

To me it sounded like we had hit a tree, as the reverberations reminded me of when a branch gets stuck under your tire, and keeps banging against the wheel well till you slow down and it emerges free, while just a teensy bit smaller.

As you can probably guess, it wasn’t a tree. According to the Daily News the next day, my train had been part of an apparent suicide, as an unknown person had apparently jumped in front of the lead car.

Now, death has always kind of shaken me. I remember coming back from the beach with Pops one time and watching a car get broadsided as it attempted to cross the road just a little too late right next to the Delaware Memorial Bridge. I watched, paralyzed, as Pops jumped out of the car and spent what seemed like 40 hours trying to resuscitate the driver as he hung out the window, to eventually be declared DOA after a trip to the hospital.

Now obviously a suicide is different than a vehicular death, especially in the mind of onlookers, as I learned while riding train 171. I was appalled to listen to people on the train, saying things like “If it had been me I would have been more thoughtful and just shot myself,” especially when we had no idea how the person our train had hit had ended up there.

During the one and a half hours we were stuck on a train in Northeast Philly I heard some of the most caustic and selfish comments I’ve ever been privy to. I’m not saying I’m always politically correct, because I know that’s not true, I was just shocked at the lack of respect for someone who had just died, whether or not that person did it by his or her own hands.

I’m sorry for being uber serious today, but this really pissed me off. Sure, people are weird around suicide, and I understand that, but I couldn’t believe we were watching crime scene photographers come and a body bag being taken away, while hateful people spewed about how this would inconvenience them making happy hour later.

I wish I had the poetic ability to sum this up in a way that makes it whimsical or deep, I just can’t. All I know is life is about perspective, and I was thankful for the moment I was gang planked across to the next train coming, and the women I sat next to, who had been waiting for 45 minutes said “It’s so sad, that was somebody’s child.”