2001-10-21 - 4:09 p.m.

Sympathy for the Careless?

I'm split on where one's feelings should lie when people do things to hurt other people, but then carry on as though they are victims as well.

The worst automobile accident I ever saw was back as an undergraduate in 1995. A sorority girl was driving her car on campus and somehow hit a woman on a bike who was crossing a busy intersection. The intersection always had tons of traffic, and I myself would walk through it about 4-6 times a day.

The reason this accident was so bad was that I actually saw the victim's body. It was the first and last time I've seen a broken and twisted human body.

The biker's injuries were not nearly as graphic as tends to end up on your standard run of the mill industrial album (or some fetish artwork), but the woman's legs were bent backwards, and her arms were severely skinned. She also was missing several teeth.

The woman was no responsive, and carried off by paramedics. But my attention also turned to the girl who ran over this other human. The girl was in emotional shock. She kept crying, "I almost killed her! I could have killed her! I didn't mean to do it! I didn't mean to do it!"

The police couldn't get her to say or do anything else. And she was visibly shaking, as if she truely was in shock.

The question that ran through my mind 7 years ago and still does today is, "How sympathic do I feel towards her?" Clearly she wasn't paying attention. Any day between class changes, pedisterians and bicyclists pass through that intersection in large numbers. But there is a part of me that understands that she was only then beginning to come to terms with what she had done.

People make mistakes. And as somebody who only saw the post impact scene, I'm not qualified to cast judgement on the sorority girl. I really am not.

Bringing This Closer To Home

But as I grow older, I do bring events like these to myself and use my feelings to judge how I should feel about other things. My ex-girlfriend has been telling people that she is sorry how things turned out. I don't like the sound of that. Not because I'm assuming she still cares about me. Looking at my older entries, do any of you think she did anything that pleased me? Have I ever seemed happy about her?

She constantly took advantage of me and never really cared about my feelings. The bottom line is, I gave her many chances over the past two years, and she actually did assault me more than once. Yes, physical violence.

Nothing that I didn't stop, and I never have ever struck a lover. But she struck me more than once and admitted right before I told her I never wanted to she her again that she was still having violent thoughts about me.

My friends have told me that in time I'll forgive her. Unlike the sorority girl whom I couldn't really judge, I was the victim of her problems -- both emotionally and physically. It was unfair, and I do think I'm worse off now than I was as a person two years ago for having known her.

Something one of my friends who was molested said about molestation, is that it stays with you forever. When her molester (somebody she knew unfortunately) passed away, it did not make her feel any better.

I suspect many victims have the same feeling of helpless. When somebody has essentially taken away one of your freedoms, it is hard to feel sorry for them in particular.

And yet, I've talked before about my grandfather (now dead) feeling me once in an inappropriate way ... and while you'd think I'd not miss him at all, I still do.

Maybe the lesson in life is that everything we experience changes us, but at the very core we go on, and that knowledge is enough to allow us to feel sorry for the people whom change others. I hope that the girl on the bike survived and that her life is better now than it was in 1995. And I do miss my grandfather and admire some of the things he did. Not all, but some.

On a more personal level, my ex-girlfriend helped me to find myself. There was a cost, but it wasn't tragic. She didn't rape me, and only hit me in anger a few times. The only lasting sadness I have from that relationship is that I just couldn't bring myself to trust Crimson and I'm very wary of any woman right now. I don't hate women, but I have become secretative around them. I won't tell them what I'm really feeling.

So it isn't as much my ex-girlfriend that I hate, but I just resent what she has succesfully done to me.

LISTENING TO: A Split Second's Flesh & Fire

-=-

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