Rubbernecking in traffic hell gives life meaning

I am heading North on the 405 freeway and the usual three mile stretch has taken over 45 minutes. The helicopters above us are guiding the fire truck with their spotlight. That can only mean that there is either a police chase or worse — an accident. As the fire truck clears a way suddenly cars around me come to a sudden stop, this type of traffic can only be attributed to a horrific accident. For reasons unknown the people of America have grown obsessed with the horror of pain.

Accidents give us meaning, something to hold on to and look for. For a single glimpse, a moment of being able to see someone else's pain and strife, a freeway of people in their deadly machines become animals. People will slow down when nearing an accident and then completely stop as they turn their "rubber necks" almost causing their own accident, for the pleasure and pain of seeing a body on the pavement. This phenomenon can only be linked to the extreme violence in our society today. Pain and suffering has become so typical and meaningless that the accidents around us become another scene in a movie. We forget that these are our friends, our coworkers, our neighbors or our family, not just a stunt created to keep us entertained.

Without suffering there would be no compassion, but what happens when we lose compassion, and suffering becomes a game? I found out later that day the reason I was stuck on the freeway for 45 minutes was because a young man on a motorcycle had been hit in the carpool lane and was killed almost instantly. The news showed horrific clips of his body on the pavement covered in blood, but it did not seem important, more like an explanation for delays. The images on the news were the same that hundreds of cars in front of me had stopped to see firsthand.

Maybe it is explained by the fact that misery loves company. We like to see someone hurt; we like to see people doing worse than we are because it makes our lives seem not as bad. But is this a natural feeling that we as Americans, or more specifically, as Californians, find relief in? "Rubber necks" is a term that describes us well. We consistently complain about sitting in traffic, but what we do not think about is that we are creating traffic at the expense of catching a glimpse of someone else's misery. We are willing to put our own lives at risk for the sake of seeing someone else dying or possibly dead. It is not the small accidents on the side of the road, the ones where we might actually be able to help, that get our attention, but instead those blood-streaked-road accidents that we can do nothing about.

It is not to say that we are horrible people, but maybe next time when your'e stuck in unbearable accident traffic, you will realize that maybe that person lying on the blood-streaked pavement deserves just a little of privacy and more importantly, compassion.

Naseem Hashemian is a senior public relations major at CSULB.