My buddy Charles discusses some insights he had that arose from his recent viewing of "Sully." Like Jeff Hodges, Charles contrasts "the miracle on the Hudson" with the Sewol ferry disaster. Here's a juicy quote:
In the end, [Captain Chesley Sullenberger] was simply doing his job, just like everyone else. Most of us, of course, do not have jobs where we hold the lives of 155 people in our hands. A bad day on the job for me means that a class maybe doesn’t go quite as well as I had hoped—nobody dies (usually). But this is the job that we ask our airline pilots to do: We ask them to carry people safely across the planet, to perform consistently under stressful conditions, and to quickly make the right decisions in times of crisis. Captain Sully did exactly what he needed to do in that situation—he did his job perfectly. I won’t argue with anyone who wants to call him a hero[;] I would just caution against using that term in such a way that it obscures the importance of simply doing your job.
Go read the rest.
I got a chuckle out of how you felt it necessary to point out my comma splice. I think my original version had "while" at the beginning of the sentence. But I'll leave it as testimony to my grievous sin against the grammar gods. May they smite me in their righteous wrath!
ReplyDeleteI'm just doing what Dr. Hodges does whenever he quotes someone at length. It's a reflex. It's also what I'm paid to do at work. Shigata ga nai. I either do the [brackets] thing, or I do the "the following quote has been edited for style/length/privacy" thing.
ReplyDeleteProof I'm a [sic] human being: here.
ReplyDeleteAnd yeah, I'm a pedantic asshole.