There is this girl at my friends restaurant. A very pretty girl, tall blonde and slender. Probably a little too focused on looks for my preferences, with teased hair judicious yet well applied makeup and large hoop ear rings. I go to this restaurant frequently; a few times per week. She had been working there for a few weeks and each time I ate there and she was my server she asked a few more questions and opened up some and even got a little flirtatious. She was pretty, probably not stimulating and captivating I guessed, but she was sincere and kind.
One time however my friend and I were eating there and she was acting quite strange. She was overly flirtatious taking every opportunity she would hear in passing conversation to mention how awesome my friend warren and I were, and ‘how did we get to be so awesome’ and ‘I wish I could date a guy as awesome as you’ (not directed at either of us in particular) she would joke about hanging out with us, fish for compliments, and egg us to take her out to dinner; very odd behavior. I figured she had just got dumped by some shitty boyfriend or found said shitty boyfriend cheating on her, she was clearly distressed and had a lot of issues going on in her life.
I told Warren and my friend who owns the restaurant that even though id have no interest in dating her I would like to hang out with her, to sit down and talk with her, to find out what was going on as I really felt she had some serious things troubling her. She probably just needed someone to really treat her with respect for once at a personal level. I told her I would come by a few days later to visit her. I missed going that day because of other circumstances. A few days later I had an appointment and upon leaving that I thought I should head to his restaurant to see how she was doing. Naa I thought. I am too busy, I have too much going on I cant be responsible for every person I come across who needs some help and a good friend.
So I headed home to work, I had a few pc’s I had to build to get them ready for the rendering I was behind on. I got home and found I was unable to work on them anyway and was starting to get peckish just as my friend called and invited me to his restaurant for dinner. I said sure and asked “Is Julie there?”
“No Julie doesn’t work with us anymore”
“what, why?”
“She had some emotional breakdown and in a fit and crying left the restaurant”
Damn. I guess I was right. I told him ok and I’d be up in a few, thinking this must have happened the Friday before. As I was pulling into his restaurant parking lot I noticed about a dozen emergency vehicles, police, fire and ambulance, etc. just up the road at the next light. Once I got in and seated I told him that it looked like there was some serious accident up the road.
“I know we think that was Julie”
“What!?” I was confused as I thought he meant it was a different nite that she stormed out. Now I realized it was tonight, just 30 minutes before. The other waitress clarified.
“Yeah, I came in and she was crying and freaking out, after a little while she calmed down and served a table, then a few minutes later I found her in the backroom on the floor crying…She then got up and said she had to go, walked out and drove away. She got up the road and hit someone apparently and he had to be flown away by lifestar.”
Jeesus. A customer at the restaurant clarified further. He was sitting at the bar and thought she was in no condition to drive for whatever reason and chased her out when he saw her run out. But his car was on the other side of the parking lot and by the time he got to it and pulled out of the parking lot she had all ready sped up the road and rear ended another car which was stopped at a light. Two days later the full story was in the paper; the man she rear ended was a 21 year old sailor, and he died from his injuries. Julie was charged with 2nd degree manslaughter because she was driving while intoxicated.
I can’t help but thinking that if I had gone in earlier, as I wanted to, I could have possibly averted this. But there was no way for me to know, and clearly if I knew what was going to happen I would have gone there with no hesitation. Unfortunately for Julie, who’s life is now mostly ruined, and for that sailor who no longer has life, we can not.
I am a strong advocate of individual responsibility. Julie made a terrible choice and a man lost his life because of it, and she has seriously derailed her own. This accident was her fault and in no way am I trying to make excuses for her. But being so close to a situation like this really makes one identify clearly their thoughts on it. I dearly empathize with Julie and her situation, as I would with the Vietnamese family raised and brainwashed by the murderous communists of the north or the Japanese soldier cultivated into murdering Chinese people in Nanking.
The legal culpability is wholly theirs and Julie’s; however I can not help but think some of the moral culpability lies on a much greater number of people. To all the people who advocate drinking away their sorrows, or finding some similar mechanism to escape reality when it gets to rough, it is also your fault. To everyone who promulgates this as normal and healthy. To every ass hole in Julies life that treated her like shit, it is their fault as well, and every ass hole who exploits and uses people. To every nihilist and existentialist who perpetuates hopelessness and fear in the face of reality. To every perjoritive selfish bastard who benefited at Julie’s expense. You are all culpable.
Yes it is Julies fault, just as smoking, alchoholism, obesity, remaining in shitty relationships, are the fault of every person who chooses at every instant to partake in them. But this undermines the role that habitualization of socialization play in our life, and the difficult often involved in making these choices. Thomas Jefferson, one of the greatest advocates of liberty in the world, owned slaves. We need to remember (especially the objectivist minded associates of mine) that we are all raised in a culture that pounds nihilism, conformity, and group thought into the skulls of every human being on this planet before they get so ready to condemn those people. Not everyone has someone close to them pushing them to be independent, teaching them foundations for rational living, pushing them to fulfill their own life, and to live up to thier greatest potential. Many people have done many great things, but it is the very rare few who rise above the tendencies of their cultures to truly assess the world and the situations in it.
Julie was raised by this culture, and her thoughts and choices and ideas about how to deal with things were pushed on her by this culture, which gets most of these ideas wrong. Unfortunately for Julie and the man she killed, circumstances for both made all of these things interact and compound into a disaster, all of it triggered by Julie making a bad choice in dealing with her pain.
If my reading of people is in any way accurate, I fear Julie is now at a terrible cusp in her life, she is probably suicidal, knowing that she has killed a man. The choices she makes in the next few days, and how she deals with this tragedy, will propel her down a course in her life at this fork in the road, and this tragedy will take two lives instead of one. Maybe not right away, but the way she has learned to deal with these choices clearly failed her in the past, and I have no doubt it will at this cusp. So I will make an effort to get in touch with her, write her a letter or something, as she now sits in Jail. Because now more than ever I believe she needs a sensible voice in her life.
I am sorry Julie, I think you made your call for help, in your own way, in the sordid way that the society you were raised in told you to. I wish I had recognized how serious it truly was and had acted on it accordingly.
Michael
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