Everybody knows or should know how it works: Some people are going to die today and others are not. It is unlikely that any one of us will die on any given day, so we tend to forget about it.It has been very difficult to do so since the Surfside building collapse. Reporters and others observed the scene, and came up with many possible reasons why the building might have collapsed. None of these reasons were obvious to those who moved into their Champlain Towers South apartments on Wednesday night. Neither to those who are still alive or to those who aren't. If you knew, you wouldn't have gone to bed.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementNext week was eight years ago. In the middle of the night, a train carrying crude oil ran riot and detonated in central Qubec. The downtown was also destroyed and 47 people were killed. Nobody had any information that would have allowed them to get in or out of the blast zone before it happened.Last week was twelve years ago. I rode from Silver Spring to Union Station on D.C. Metro Red Line for an errand. Also, to get a haircut. My family was away so I didn't have to do the errand at that time. Instead, I procrastinated into the afternoon. A live newscast from Metro was shown on the TV in my hair salon. One train of the Red Line had collided with another train, resulting in eight deaths. I would have been on the train if I had not wasted another ten minutes.AdvertisementThere were many stories about near misses or the dark opposites of near misses. People who had stayed home, people who had gone to work early, and people who made a small, but significant change in their daily lives that could have made a difference in their life. Even the insistence on talking about how beautiful the morning was amounted to a complaint over the arbitrariness and lack of a suitable, heedable sign.The building fell without any preface.It is easy to distance yourself from an awful event by finding the reason that it happened to someone else, even if it is wishful thinking. Mark Wahlberg made a change on his flight from Boston to avoid one of the hijacked planes, and then spun a fantasy about how he would fight the hijackers if he had been there. William Langewiesche told the Atlantic readers that two different passengers were killed by the Boeing 737 Max. He explained to them that they had been on flights with foreign airlines whose pilots didn't have the airmanship necessary to manage a self-crashing aircraft.AdvertisementThis impulse drove Americans into a sectarian frenzy under the COVID pandemic. It was possible to avoid the disease with proper precautions and distance if you were not an essential worker. The disease was a judgment against crowded urbanites who were too scared of it; however, it was also a judgement on reckless exurbanites who weren't sufficiently afraid of it.After more than a decade of competing survivors fantasies, shibboleths and sustained competition, Americans started to return to public life again. Gun slaughter resumed where it left off. People were again dying just because they went to work or to the grocery shop or to a party. The events were again called unimaginable, even though they had occurred before.AdvertisementAdvertisementThe building fell without any preface in plain view from a security camera, where COVID represents an atmosphere of fear and the massacres an atmosphere of malice. It was not the entire building. The two images that linger were of the rubble pile, the familiarly unrecognizable shambles and a miniature Ground Zero, as well as the bunk bed, which is still in place on the top floor. One man, who had walked out from his apartment, told media that the apartment numbers in his hall were gone along with their occupants. That was the dividing line, that was sharp, that arbitrary, that absolute.
