Imagine the horror of Donna Moss when she checks the White House fax machine and incoming is a message from NASA's Office of Space Cadets warning that a huge Chinese satellite is falling from the sky, and will strike the earth. Donna is the Executive Assistant to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman in the legendary TV series, The West Wing, and she’s low-key having a panic attack about this satellite.
“A satellite is crashing to Earth, and NASA sent us a fax?!”
NASA does not know when or where it will strike. She spends the entire episode, called The Fall's Gonna Kill You, buzzing around the White House and letting people know. To her great dismay, no one cares. The President’s assistant laughs about it, her boss walks away mid-sentence while she’s describing the coming cataclysm, the First Lady of the United States almost snort-laughs when Donna tells her the bad news. The Press Secretary also finds the whole thing amusing.
By the end of the episode, Donna is wondering if she’s crazy. Why does no one care that this satellite is coming down?
Here’s the thing though, Donna’s boss, Josh Lyman…. has been withholding some key information from her all day — for his amusement.
NASA, it turns out, sends this fax almost every day. Normally Donna doesn’t receive it. Satellites are falling all the time, usually one per day.
You Are Not The Center of the Universe
Not once has a human being been struck by space junk. It seems wild but it’s true. My wife is smarter than me and she recalled as we watched this episode, “Yeah well 71 percent of the Earth’s surface is water.”
We think of ourselves as the center of the universe, the main characters in the story of the universe. In reality, 300 satellites and their pieces fall through our atmosphere every year, and there’s barely a 25% chance it even hits land. Then after that, it’s 1 in 10,000 that a human being is annihilated by a scrap of satellite.
It’s 2023, and it has yet to happen.
I want to be clear about this though. Am I saying that unlikely things never occur and you shouldn’t have contingency plans? No. Never. Napoleon had a rule of thumb for his generals, he said a good commander should “ask himself frequently during the day, "What would I do if the enemy's army appeared now in my front, or on my right, or my left?" If he has any difficulty in answering these questions, his position is bad, and he should seek to remedy it.”
The White House would look pretty damn stupid if a civilian finally got killed by debris and their excuse was, “We didn’t think it would ever happen.”
Behind the scenes of the White House, the President’s senior staff is dealing with a far larger fish. President Bartlett has been for years concealing a fatal illness from the public. Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman approaches the very stressed-out Press Secretary, CJ Craig, and asks her if she thinks it would look bad if they put out a poll asking the public what they’d think of a politician hiding a health condition from voters. CJ is tired, but still stunned, and invokes a scene from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid:
“That is like looking over a cliff at the boulder-filled rapids below and worrying that if you jump — you might drown. The fall is gonna kill you.”
Your Wild Imagination Isn’t Helping
We worry about all the wrong things.
Sometimes when I’m driving I think about what I would do if the brakes stopped working or the acceleration stuck to the floor like the Good Ol Boys camper in The Blue Brothers. I think about if my car would flip and do barrel rolls if the tire exploded while driving at 80 mph. I think about Final Destination and that damned scene of the logs falling off the back of the truck and killing drivers, smashing through their windshields and you know the rest.
This is what I think about every so often, completely ignoring the banal reality of life and death on the road. The odds of dying in a random, uninteresting, and avoidable car crash are not insignificant. Some bozo will just miss their traffic light and that’s the ballgame. The odds are about 1 in 100. That’s scary. But most of us don’t actively worry about this, because driving places is a thing we have to do.
Our lives wouldn’t function if we acknowledged that incredibly steep risk.
No one would ever “run back out” to the grocery store for that box of Cheerios they forgot if they thought about it as yet another dice roll per day with a 1 in 100 chance of being killed and leaving their loved ones behind.
After CJ Craig drops that Sundance Kid reference on Josh Lyman about how the fall alone will kill you, Lyman pauses and thinks about the satellites falling. He, like everyone, laughs it off because no human being has ever been hit.
But now Josh says to himself, “Seems like we’re overdue.”
Pay Attention!
So what am I getting at here?
Live every day to the fullest cause you never know when it’s your last? Sure.
Be humble?! Remember the satellites and that 71% of the Earth’s surface is water and you’re not the center of the universe? Yeah, that too.
But perhaps the number one thing I’m driving at here is to pay attention to the little things — to focus on the here and now.
The greatest risk to you on the road is not the driver who runs the red light, it is the driver barrelling toward the intersection with no signs of slowing down that you did not see coming. Maybe you were changing the playlist on Spotify and looked away for just a few moments.
Pay attention. Keep your concentration here and now where it belongs.
Abstract fears distract us from clear and present dangers. Distraction imperils us all (more on that in the next post) more than any zombie apocalypse scenario you could dream up.
Focus. Look up.
This is the way.
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