Sometimes I feel like my wife and I are the only ones left on the planet that have any concept of what is truly important. We were watching a TV newscast not long ago where they were explaining how a young couple's 2 year old child had been sucked away in a mudslide. The father had gone after her but wasn't able to catch her; she disappeared from his view. A few hours later some neighbors brought her back, a bit scared but unharmed. They were able to pull the child out of the mud and save her life.

As they were interviewing this couple they had their family surrounding them, and in the background you could see their house. Or, rather, what was left of it, which consisted mostly of a large hole in the ground. They were crying as they looked into the camera and said, "Yes, we've lost everything. It's all gone."

I looked at my wife and saw that her jaw was also wide open. Surrounded by their family, all of whom were unhurt (including a rather miraculous rescue of their daughter), they were bemoaning the fact that they "had lost everything."

I'm glad I wasn't there. I know that it must have been quite a trauma to these people, but I wanted to scream at them "all you lost was STUFF. You're whole freaking family is there and unhurt. Anything, ANYTHING that you've lost is a TEMPORARY setback at best."

Another time I was watching the TV news (maybe I should just stop watching the news….); this was a while ago when the Brown's had left town. (For those of you who aren't football fans, or live somewhere other than Ohio, The Cleveland Browns were a professional football team that moved to Baltimore. I'll keep the details short; suffice it to say that it upset a lot of people around town). There was a guy the referred to as "Big Dog" who was a rather…large Brown's fan. "Large" here is used in both senses; physically and in his love of the team. He was making a speech that included something along the lines of "and this is the worst I've felt since my father died".

It took me several seconds to realize that I had, indeed, heard him correctly. And all I could think of was "a football team leaving town is as bad as your father dying? Either your priorities are severely screwed up or you and your father had a lousy relationship".

Not long ago I wrote an article on perspective. I am a big advocate of the "there are two sides to every story" line of thought. And I'm really, really hoping that I didn't get the full story on these comments; that they were somehow taken out of context, or manipulated in some way. I'm really hoping that the shock that I felt at these comments was completely unjustified, and that if found the entire story I would agree with them.

I'm also very glad that I'm not so cynical that these comments flipped past me without me noticing them.

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