On the Edge of Catastrophe

Presence of Mind in a Crisis

It was right at dusk when everything hit the fan. You know that moment, when it isn’t quite dark but dark enough to impair your vision? Your car’s headlights are on, but they aren’t really providing much value. It was right in that narrow window of reduced visibility that I saw the car slam into the old woman. I was driving down a 4-lane street and the car coming toward me hit an elderly woman who was crossing the road. No brakes. Full speed at around 40 mph. The force of the blow launched the old woman up into the air several yards in front of the car. The driver immediately slowed down but didn’t stop, I suspect because the old woman was above his field of vision. She must have been 12 or 14 feet in the air. The car eventually caught up with the woman and, as she came down, she landed hard on the roof of the car, then rolling off the back, she landed in a crumpled heap on the pavement behind the car. I saw all of this out of the corner of my eye as I was traveling the opposite direction from the car that hit the woman. This kind of unexpected crisis takes a bit to sink in. Your brain rebels at quickly grasping and processing what your eyes just saw.

When the old woman landed on the roof of the car, the driver well-and-truly freaked out, veering suddenly into my lane and risking a head-on collision. I steered hard to my right and the freaked out driver zoomed past my left rear fender, crossed two lanes behind me, and finally ground to a halt when he hit the curb and a street light.

After veering right to avoid the head-on collision, I did a rapid u-turn into the parking lot on my left, jumped from my car and starting running toward the woman, lying ominously still, in the road.

Here’s my reason for writing about these events: between the time I saw the woman roll off the back of that car, and the moment I was running toward her in the street, my memory is a total blank. I got nothing. I only know of my actions because my family, who was with me in the car, told me about them later. None of them had seen the woman being hit. All they knew was that the other driver inexplicably came straight at us in our lane.

Your mind does funny things during moments of extreme stress. In my experience (and unfortunately I have had some experience) sudden catastrophic events reveal innate mental capabilities that normal events simply can’t exercise. I’m not exactly talking about intelligence. I’m really talking about the wherewithal to maintain your senses and focus on the critical things in the midst of extreme trauma or danger.

When my self-awareness returned, as I was running toward the street, I briefly slowed down and looked around at the people standing in the parking lot. I had the fleeting hope that someone else was going to go tend to the old woman lying in the road. About that time, the stop light down the road changed from red to green and two lanes of cars started heading toward the woman lying in the road. I ran out into the street, waved the cars to a stop, and then did what I could to tend to the old woman. She died there in the street a few minutes later.

There were quite a few people in the parking lot, but none of them was immediately involved or helping. It took them what felt like a long time to process what they had seen. Eventually their innate decency kicked in and they started helping. Someone brought a blanket. A couple of guys stood in front of the traffic and started directing cars around the scene of the accident. But it took a surprising amount of time between when the events occurred, and when people recovered the presence of mind which allowed them to take action. It was minutes, not seconds, before people generally began to move.

One of the life lessons from those events, for me at least, was that the majority of people struggle with maintaining their presence of mind during moments of sudden extreme stress. They will eventually recover their ability to act, but very few are able to immediately react decisively in the immediacy and adrenaline rush of a catastrophic moment.

I thus found Donald Trump’s own actions during the very midst of an assassination attempt highly revealing. There may not be one man in ten thousand, shot and bleeding, still standing in the kill zone, who would have had the ability to maintain his presence of mind and continue to press his priorities and mission. It was, honestly, stunning.

It also, I think, illustrated the difference between someone in possession of his faculties and someone who is not. One of the early signs of mental decline is an inability to process and apply new or unexpected information. People with early dementia can seem fine, but you will often see them mentally paralyzed when faced with the need to apply unexpected or unfamiliar data. When that need emerges in a catastrophic context, a dangerous driving situation let’s say, or an enemy attack, you have found out far too late what has gone missing.

Trump standing there, bleeding, fist in the air shouting “fight”, was not a man who was having a difficult time processing or reacting to what had just happened. And he was able to do this at the very moment of potential and impending catastrophe. He is just not an average person.

I know it is hard for people to separate Trump from politics, but getting shot is not a question of politics or policy. I’m not even directly trying to touch on the question of Trump’s morals, although it’s worth mentioning C.S. Lewis’ observation that courage is the form of every virtue at the testing point. Yesterday, Trump showed the world something about himself as a man, something that can only ever be demonstrated during a moment of real catastrophe. Something that will be almost impossible for his opponents to ever match or to counter.

As Americans, along with America’s enemies, absorb the implications of Trump’s behavior yesterday, Trump’s political opponents will likely begin to seem very low by comparison - like jackals seem, skulking in the shadow of a lion. And if I were one of America’s enemies, I would be suddenly awash in a dramatically elevated sense of urgency to act, and much sooner than I might have planned.

The coming election season stands to be far more dangerous and portentous than any election of my lifetime.