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Winging along at sixty-five miles per hour eastbound past Lacrosse, Wisconsin on I90 last Friday, I was returning home feeling tired, but good after a week of training.
Up ahead, about half a mile just beyond exit five, was what appeared to be a very slow moving vehicle in the left lane. I was in the right. Next to me, though, was another vehicle barreling on with me neck and neck.
As I looked closer, I thought that the vehicle up ahead actually appeared to be stopped. I immediately thought he must be on the left shoulder then or in the median. As we got closer, it became obvious: this car was stopped dead in the left lane...it wasn't moving one bit.
A car about five hundred yards ahead of me passed the stopped car and began to flash his taillights warning us of potential disaster. I slowed to allow the vehicle to my left room to move over ahead of me. He did not.
Having passed me by about five car lengths, he rolled on. I slowed a bit more. He wasn't reacting to the stalled car at all.
I thought, My God, man, slow down.
On he went.
Slow down, man, slow down. I found myself mouthing the words. But he did not.
Without a hint of a swerve or a flicker of a brake light, at a full sixty-five miles per hour, he plowed into the back of that stalled car. Directly in front of me, playing out like a movie, was the sickening thud of car on car, the crunch of metal and the splash of parts.
The impact hurled the rear of the stopped car upward. It rolled and flipped twice coming to rest near the median on its driver's side.
I checked my rearview to make sure no one was bearing down on me, swerved to my right, picked my way through already strewn debris and pulled over onto the shoulder and then the grass maybe one hundred feet beyond the wreck. Shaken, I speared my cell phone and immediately dialed 911.
Three minutes later I was out of my car intending to run back to help. I almost couldn't believe what I saw. Lines of cars were stopped in the roadway in both directions. Amazingly not another vehicle was involved in the crash. Already both cars were surrounded by citizen helpers.
The man who rear-ended the stalled vehicle, the front of his completely caved to the windshield, was out of his car in a flash. Miraculously unharmed, this large, sharp-suited African American was the first to reach the flipped car to try to help.
Another man was on top of the vehicle already trying to bend car parts with his hands to get to the person trapped inside.
Another, who had to be seventy years old, was directing traffic in the eastbound lanes while still another did the same in the west. Incredible.
Black people, white people, Hispanic people. Men and women. Old and young. This group of ordinary American citizens brought instant order to chaos.
There was nothing for me to do. About two minutes later the police came, followed in moments by the ambulance. I figured the best thing I could do was get out of the way.
As I drove off, my head spinning from the sheer violence of the past few moments, I began to think about the maligned American citizen. We've been called apathetic and fat. We're slipping in the rankings of the world in many categories, including education, and we're lazy.
Yeah, maybe.
But all of the promise of the American citizen played out for me on Friday. We may be all those things, but human beings...Americans...have so much potential still tucked away, and as always it seems, when the chips are down it comes glowing to the surface.
The day we lose sight of human potential and allow cynicism to rule the day is the day we're done as a society.
The day you allow that, is the day you're done as leader.
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