Movie-Ambulance Syndrome

My wife's family tree did not grow cowardly branches. When her mother was my wife's current age, living in Laos, a king cobra sprung from the grass and swaggered upward, until it was looking down on her. Its eyes were black and vacant. Its speckled, olive-skinned hood unfolded in the hot sun, and her mother could judge by its markings that the cobra was old, old enough to be arrogant and certain of her death—its darting tongue and high-pitched hissing, merely playmaking. She saw countless snakes, some of which could kill an elephant instantly. Never before had she looked up to one. She stood motionless but knew one of them would die. The cobra struck without warning. She sidestepped away from its venomous fangs and hacked off its exposed neck with her knife, sending its head and speckled hood fluttering in the air. The chicken she was cutting had flown in all directions, and she bent down to pick up the remains, as her daughter chortled in bemusement. Their dinner now covered in dirt, she pulled out the headless snake’s bones and chopped up its body into a bitter soup that she drank down with little satisfaction.

Philavanh arrived in America three years after her mother’s confrontation with the cobra, almost ten years after her uncle’s perilous escape from Laos on a makeshift raft. Crossing the Mekong River, she felt the pinches of a thousand ghosts who have drowned in their own unsuccessful attempts to escape communism. When they reached Thailand, red marks covered her small body. Seeing the airport’s runway lights, she asked her mother if they were going to a wedding. Life was less dangerous in Illinois, where the only concerns were the occasional garden snake slithering past the porch, the occasional Midwestern storm that turned day into night, illuminating the summer sky in sporadic bursts.

However, on August 8, 2007 at 2:45 p.m., a funnel cloud was spotted outside Gilberts, Illinois. The cloud’s computerized path, a circling maroon patch of pixels projected on weather.com, was heading toward Sleepy Hollow, Elgin, and then southbound. Very quickly, the fluorescent lights flickered several times at the office I worked in Lake Zurich, and dark clouds blotted out the sun. Knowing my wife was in Elgin, I called her cell phone. She picked up after three rings. At the top of her lungs my daughter was screaming for some toy. On my computer monitor the storm swallowed counties in real time—a halting, wavering dance through rectangular blocks of Northwestern Illinois. Each warning I read said 'seek shelter immediately.' My wife clearly was having some difficulty with those instructions.

“Dao,” I said, “there’s a tornado in Elgin. Right now, in Elgin.”

“That’s ridiculous,” she said. She always felt my courage was suspect, only proven when uttering a high-pitched expletive at another driver who cut me off, or when washing spiders down the drain. “There's no tornado, but it's raining like hell. Every place I’ve gone hasn't let me in.”

“It landed in Gilberts . . . making its way through Elgin in less than ten minutes . . . . Says here, ‘seek shelter immediately. Stay away from windows’ . . . .”

“I’m outside the store, but they won't let me in.” She rattled the glass with our daughter’s sippy cup. Countless times we gave our money to this store for fruit snacks, diapers, and gallons of apple juice. When there’s a tornado, they lock the doors on us. She yelled, “Who locks the doors on a pregnant woman? With a toddler?” I heard voices of strangers joining hers in unison, screaming “yeah,” and “right on,” at the store clerk they saw inadvertently passing the locked doors.

Debris spiraling from a tornado’s winds was more likely to kill someone than the black blender that tears through Kansas farmhouses on the evening news. Miles away from her, I was useless. Being a typical American addicted to pop-culture, I was sucked into a movie fantasy of some plucky hero, who would take control of the situation and smash a row of shopping carts through the glass. Everyone would erupt in applause. When they got inside, they would say some stupid catchphrase, such as “Thought we ought to drop in.”

Instead, my wife and daughter were among strangers outside a big box store, looking at each other in bewilderment, as though the last lifeboat drifted away from their sinking ship with only two passengers, world's apart from each other, neither looking back. She waited outside until the storm past. The automatic doors then opened, and someone in a red vest greeted them with a shopping cart.

She did not ask him again as she walked past: “Why would you lock out a pregnant woman with a toddler during a tornado warning?”

In the movies I’ve seen, my family would have been the distressed victims of circumstance, just the kind of people a hero sets forth to save against all odds. I know times have changed, and maybe these notions only occur to me because I am a member of the Entitlement Generation, formerly known as Generation X, but we were taught concrete morals from the movies. For example, a few years before he was the lovable neurotic New Yorker in Mad About You, Paul Reiser was the guy who slams the door on Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, when she is being hunted by a horde of drooling, acid-spewing creatures. We are outraged at this act of cowardice but know he will get his comeuppances.

Today, would we cheer him not for cowardice but for acting with self-preservation? I wanted to contact the head offices of that big box store. In a conversation late at night, Dao and I narrowed the explanations we would receive from them:
“We would be liable if something terrible would happen once we started letting in more people from the storm (i.e. tornado sucking up the roof, support beams falling on us, hostage situation, so on and so on). We wanted to protect our assets. Who’s to say you guys wouldn’t just ransack our store in times of crisis? There was a reason you didn’t see any Walmart's or Target's in Mad Max.”

We never heard the reason because as soon as I was setting down my pen to write contemptuous words, being the obedient consumer, I forgave them the following day by buying paper plates for my daughter, on which Diego, always beaming with joy when swinging into the day's newest adventure, which invariably was freeing sloths or some other animal from certain danger.

I have faith in the big box store that they acted in good faith. I am certain that locking the doors during inclement weather is policy for many places. I mean, our bank also closed its doors on my wife. Since they hold all my money, I haven’t been making such a big deal about it.

But the funnel cloud never touched down, or I assume it didn’t, because I don’t remember the news mentioning the storm again. A far worse, fully formed tornado pummeled Brooklyn (Brooklyn!), and the days past, I reflected more on that tragedy than the mere inconvenience of my wife standing outside during tornado warnings, not knowing if the resounding sound of thunder was instead the train sounds of a twister barreling down on her and my daughter.

I think it illustrates a larger issue. We have to look in our hearts, and ask ourselves, have we become a nation closing the door on people who need our help, a nation of Paul Reiser’s? It leaves me to wonder, as everyone has wondered, not whether the global climate crisis exists, but whether we can still stop it after years of inaction.

At that time, when my wife was locked out, before Galveston was wiped off the planet, Texas had seen rain of the biblical sort. On one particular day, the rainfall exceeded 13 inches. As I said, a tornado destroyed city blocks of Brooklyn, the first time in a hundred years. Prior to this, we saw Galesburg. We saw Katrina. We saw Tsunami. We see these things, and we instantly forget them, as we have forgotten every other horrific tragedy that crosses the pixels of our HDTVs.

It’s a national phenomenon, not documented, but still as true: We are suffering from movie-ambulance syndrome, in which these national tragedies have ended in our consciousness as soon as a trickle of help arrives, just as we assume it’s the ending of a horror film when the flashing red lights of an ambulance plaster the big movie screen. The ambulance arrives after some dastardly plot is foiled, and the heroes, no matter how bandaged and broken, will pull through. Everyone is safe. Credits roll, and we leave the theater.

With Katrina, after days of collective hand-wringing and watching Anderson Cooper interviewing Louisiana residents on deserted dirt roads, we witnessed the National Guard enter New Orleans as though they were conquering a third-world country. The ambulance came. We changed the channel to a new reality show. Bush spoke on a megaphone, and Ground Zero was covered over with daisies and memorials, no matter how many times Keith Olbermann made a point of exhibiting the blasted ruins of Ground Zero years after the attacks.

I’ve seen some people get infuriated when the word “Katrina” enters a conversation. You cannot tell them how many homicides have occurred since the FEMA fiasco. You cannot discuss how their insurance companies refused to pay, or why they were left behind when others fled in their cars. That movie is finished for them. They left the theaters, the ushers are tugging their sleeves. It’s not over, but they’ve seen enough.

Is there a greater disease at play here, a new direction for our moral compass? Our parents and grandparents lived through the Great Depression and thus developed a scarcity mentality, in which people were all in the mess together. For the Boomers, this translated into a pull-yourself-by-your-own-bootstraps, every-man-for-himself indifference combined with a dash of me-first chivalry to give us, their children, whatever we asked for. In the nineties, however, we had the belief that the world was fat with resources and vaguely pro-American—anyone could obtain what they dreamed. Therefore, you can understand where the confusion is, when a young soldier questioned the former Secretary of Defense about more armor and weapons, and he received the response, “You fight a war with what you got.”

You survive a hurricane with what you got. You rebuild a town in Kansas with what you got. You go to war with what you got. You suffer economic collapse with what you got. So on and so on, until the mentality of nonparticipation spread throughout all walks of life, very much like the mentality of unaccountability, as seen in Ronald Regan’s utterance, “Mistakes were made,” which became a colloquial non-response in the American mind that rewards our incuriosity until we are bored into questioning why did we not see this happening. We see the flashing lights of an ambulance. We exhale and say, "That was a close one," and again we leave the popcorn on the sticky theater floor for someone else to pick up.

When we are faced with a cobra looming over us, instead of severing its head immediately, we now make excuses, we try to find blame for its slithering in the grass, we expect someone else will kill it, or worse, we convince ourselves it's not the cobra in front of us that we should worry about but the asp that may be hiding behind it.

Every generation laments the lost majesty of yesterday. I miss the drab normalcy of the nineties. I miss the scandals that didn’t result in mass death, the proxy wars about which we never knew. True freedom means not having to worry about your government. Now we are hoping a new ambulance driver will fix our broken world. We are waiting in the dark theater for our happy ending, to go about our lives and somehow save our families from financial ruin. It is there we are waiting for our entitlement, what was promised us years ago, promised to my immigrating family, my wife's, and yours, The Great Idea that convinced our ancestors to plant the roots of our sprawling family trees in of all places, America: We deserve a good life.

I don't know if the ambulance is coming. I can hear the sirens fracturing the night, these darks days of global economic and climate crisis, but until it arrives, we have to hold on as best we can with what we got.