WE SAW A MAN DIE TODAY Sunshine. Restaurant. Small lake, about one football fiel

WE SAW A MAN DIE TODAY

Sunshine. Restaurant. Small lake, about one football field wide, by two long. Tree lined. Families. Chatter. Play. Laugher. Laying on a blanket in a mix of sun and shade.

Voice of a female friend, shouting, authoritative, with urgency and fear. I look. About twenty yards away.

Some older man I can’t see dismisses her with that patronizing tone that traditional cultures still demonstrate daily.

No men are moving. The women are just looking. So it can’t be serious right? In America, when serious things happen, men run to it. Heroism is ingrained in us. So it must be ok. Right?

Shouting continues. I can’t understand what they’re saying. But people are walking toward her. My other friend wakes up from the racket and runs to the water’s edge, looking.

My subconscious says that she is telling an older man not to let his grandchild play in the water or something. It sure doesn’t look clean enough to swim in – at least that’s my opinion.

Time passes – maybe twenty seconds. I wake up fully. I realize something isn’t quite right, and start walking toward the water.

I see them watching someone swimming on the other side of the lake. All the other men all around the lake are also watching this guy swim. But he looks fine. And the men aren’t running or diving in, so I don’t understand what’s going on.

Our friend, the woman that was shouting, starts running down the lake toward the restaurant. I notice that two other men seem to be in the water now, on the other side of the lake. I ‘m not sure but I think a man from our side of the lake started to swim over there.

Oh. Now I see. They’ve lifted a man off the bottom. It takes quite a while to get him to the surface, and to shore. His color is wrong. The limpness is wrong. Someone tells me he was under for five minutes before my friend noticed his shirt floating to the surface. That means by now its got to have been what, minimum eight, maybe twelve minutes he’s been under water?

The single young man tried to rescue him. No one else did. He is swearing and tired. They do a few things right, and a few things wrong. They don’t push hard enough , fast enough, and long enough and they still try to put air in his lungs. They put him on his side and smack his back a few times (good) then roll him back, and continue. They slap his face, hard. They pump some more. They roll him on his side (good) then his stomach (really bad).

Two men from the restaurant arrive and take over – too heavy to run the distance they walk the last bit. The young guy who worked so hard knows the answer – it’s not gonna work. He curses loudly – as a shout. The heavy guy takes over pumping. Not hard enough either, but better.

Many minutes pass. Silence from the crowd. Apparently my friend was yelling because a woman on the other side was calling for help and all the young (fit strong) men on this side did nothing. The old man was making excuses. Covering for their shame I assume.

It’s been far too long now. Someone tells me he was drinking. Someone else says to me “Its our culture”. I say that it used to be our culture too – and mothers stopped it in just a few years. And that it was up to mothers to stop it in their boys. Some cops arrive, has to have been at least a ten minute response time. They jump the fence and have at him, and they press hard and fast enough.

Time passes… what seems to me like a ridiculous amount of time. And we see an ambulance. These guys have bolt cutters, open the fence, and move in proper form, have at him, zap him, pump him, roll him, inject him, insert the IV, zap him, pump him, put electrodes on, and they keep it up for what I think is a heroic period of time. I have no idea, but it’s long enough that even if he came around I’m not sure what would be left working upstairs.

They continue to work hopefully but the guy with the paper strip reading the ekg is really just documenting for the coroner what all the rest of us have known since they pulled him out of the water.

They cover him with a light blue blanket.

Maybe half an hour later the equivalent of the ukrainian crime scene crew shows up. Four men and one woman in a compact chinese car with ukrainian badging.

They do the usual thing. It goes on for a couple of hours.

The next time some middle easterner, or anyone for that matter, disrespects Americans for their feeling that they need to be heroes – to own the commons, and every soul in it – I swear to god I’m going to beat that guy within an inch of his life before I tell him this story – very slowly.

THE MEN JUST STOOD THERE.

Do you want to know why Ukraine as had two revolutions and will need a third before they rid themselves of corruption?

The men just stand there.

MEN CAN’T JUST STAND THERE.