The Death of Roger Williamson
Monday, May 05, 2008
The Death of Roger Williamson
Most of you probably don't know who Roger Williamson is, I didn't know who he was an hour ago either. I suppose you need to be at least a fan of car racing to know a little bit about this driver. He was a famous British race car driver back in the 1970s, an up and coming celebrity on the race tracks after winning the British Formula Three Championships two years in a row just before the fatal accident in 1973 that cost him his life. Roger Williamson's race car suffered a punctured tyre, and this caused his race car to spin wildly out of control in the middle of the race track. His vehicle smashed into the barrier to the right, and the high speed collision catapulted the burning car more than three hundred yards down the track before coming to a halt by the edge of the tarmac road. His car was overturned at that time, and Roger Williamson was trapped inside his cockpit with the fire from the burning petrol slowly creeping in. For more than two minutes, other race cars drove by without stopping, and the spectators just sat there and watched the car burn without doing anything to rescue the trapped man. That was until David Purley, a member of another race team, pulled up by the side of the wreckage and decided to help out.
David Purley, walking away.
Most of you probably don't know who Roger Williamson is, I didn't know who he was an hour ago either. I suppose you need to be at least a fan of car racing to know a little bit about this driver. He was a famous British race car driver back in the 1970s, an up and coming celebrity on the race tracks after winning the British Formula Three Championships two years in a row just before the fatal accident in 1973 that cost him his life. Roger Williamson's race car suffered a punctured tyre, and this caused his race car to spin wildly out of control in the middle of the race track. His vehicle smashed into the barrier to the right, and the high speed collision catapulted the burning car more than three hundred yards down the track before coming to a halt by the edge of the tarmac road. His car was overturned at that time, and Roger Williamson was trapped inside his cockpit with the fire from the burning petrol slowly creeping in. For more than two minutes, other race cars drove by without stopping, and the spectators just sat there and watched the car burn without doing anything to rescue the trapped man. That was until David Purley, a member of another race team, pulled up by the side of the wreckage and decided to help out.
David rushed to the burning car only to hear his friend screaming for help from inside the raging inferno. At that time, Roger Williamson merely suffered from minor bruises from the crash, and he was perfectly conscious when he realized that it was David outside of his wrecked car, trying to turn it over. The fire was still minimal at that time, but the sheer weight of the car prevented David from turning it over. Roger kept screaming inside the burning car, but it was simply too much for a single man to move. Spectators finally came over to help, but it was already too late. By this time of the accident, the fire was already out of control. David, however, was the only person still trying to rescue his friend, still straying fire extinguisher into the fire while everybody else just stood by and watched with their eyes on the fire. David called out for others to help him out, he waved towards the crowd of people standing on the other side of the road, and even risked his life by standing next to the track as the other cars raced on by at more than one hundred miles per hour. But no one came, no one stopped. He watched his friend burn to death hopelessly that morning, because everybody just stood by - they just stood by.
I thought that the internet has desensitized me to the world, I thought that nothing can get to me anymore. It's just the way things work anyway, how we have become used to seeing people get stabbed to death on television, or the news of an incestuous father raping his own daughter in the middle of the night. Just a few weeks ago, the world was shocked by the story of Joseph Fritzl, the man who locked his own daughter up in an underground dungeon for twenty-four years, and even bore eight children with her in the time why he kept her in captive. It is a horrendous crime, a crime that is condemned by the public at large. But then again, if you think about it, we have already heard variations of such news from all around the world. We have already heard of that other Austrian girl who was kept in captive in a similar fashion for eight years in 2006, we have also heard about the incestuous relationship between the father and the daughter in Australia - only, they were truly lovers, which made it even more disturbing.
Such crimes, and crimes that are even worse than this, are happening all around the world as we speak. Television channels plaster these news all over the screen for twenty four hours a day, newspapers put pictures of the villains and the victims on the front pages, and then they repeat the same pieces of information over and over again until the news tastes like stale bread. That is when they decide to take it off the air, that is when people become institutionalized to such crimes, to such violence. It is not helped by the fact that it is so easy to find far more disturbing stories or imageries of crimes all around the world. The Google search engine has its own filters, but that doesn't make it difficult for an average teenager to find videos of a man being raped to death by a horse, or a man being quartered. Blood and gore seems to be part of our culture now, we just love to see a man being torn into pieces because it is not something we view on a day to day basis. Our society does not encourage such an act, which has also fueled this perverse lust for such entertainment.
I have seen a lot of pictures and videos in my time, usually because of peer pressure or just out of plain curiosity. It was not uncommon for a group of school boys to gather around the computer in the classroom back in those days, to be either ogling over the pictures of naked women or a video with extremely gruesome content. It excited us to watch those videos, simply it gave us a rush of blood to the head. It provided us with an alternate universe somehow, an universe different from out own. The idea of such things being done to another human being in the same world that we are living in is beyond us, which is the root of all those fascination and all those intrigue. Some of us ponder over the reasons why a man would attempt to cut his own penis off on the camera, while some others would just brush it off their shoulders and go on with their lives. When you realize that you cannot come up with any rational answers for their irrational behaviors, you give up trying to find more answers yourself. That is when you just accept things as they are, you tell yourself "Shit happens". You have officially become one of those drones in our society, numbed by what is happening to the world around us.
It is not your fault to be the way that you are, that is just the way things work. The more we are exposed to certain things, the less we feel towards it. It's kind of like the human's immunity system somehow, the way it battles some allergic reactions. Your body can become stronger and more immune to a certain allergic effect if it is in constant exposure, and the same theory works in this case I suppose. Another old lady gets stabbed in the street corner around your house, another child is beaten by his parents without anybody knowing it. We absorb the news on television, we pass it out from the other ear. Nothing surprises anymore, nothing is shocking enough for us to be truly affected by it. Somehow, we just need something even more shocking now, we need something even more gratifying in a perverted way. That's why it took three planes, the Pentagon, and the entire World Trade Center in 2001 to knock some sense into the heads of people around the world. It took that much shock and awe for us to realize that "Hey, this is wrong. We need to do something about it." What is happening to our world?
I thought I have seen it all, and heard it all too. But personally, what affects me the most is usually the ignorance of mankind. To me, a man trying to cut his own testicles off is just an act of stupidity. A man trying to rape his daughter is just a crime that is against the law of the country, and perhaps basic human principles as well. But don't show me pictures and videos of people just standing by, videos of people not giving a helping hand. But then that is emblematic of humanity, don't you think. That is the nature of mankind throughout history, to have one heroic figure do the dirty job while others just stand by and watch. That is the video you are going to see below, the heroic act of David Purley as he attempts to rescue his friend while the other people just stood by to watch. The end of the video when David Purley walks away from the burning wreckage is probably some of the most moving images I have ever seen.
What is the point of awarding this man with medal for his heroism? Surely, some of those recognition could have gone into recognizing the fact that a fellow human needed help at that time, recognizing the fact that a human life was at stake. The acknowledgement came way too late, a person died before the eyes of hundreds and live on camera. To the rest of the world, it was just another man dying from a car accident. To the spectators, it was just an unfortunate incident that was bound to happen one way or another. To the other race car drivers, it was their chance to jump two rankings up. To David Purley, it was the loss of a friend.
A lot of questions went through my mind when I watched this video. Why didn't the rest of the people do something? What were they looking at when they just stood there? Why didn't they at least pretend to help? Where was the firefighting crew? Why didn't anybody else in the race stop to help? I read about an explanation online, saying that the firefighting crew thought that the burning car belonged to David Purley, and seeing that he was already safely out of the car, they did not activate their fire trucks to go onto the scene. Seriously, if they expected us to believe in that kind of idiotic statements, they were clearly mistaken. Maybe those people just didn't want to dirty their suits, they didn't want to dirty their hands by trying to roll the car over. Perhaps they thought, since they didn't know the man inside the burning car, it was OK for him to die as long as he could walk away from the incident without the need of sending his suit for dry cleaning. Whatever happened to mankind, you ask. Whatever happened.
This entry was posted
on Monday, May 05, 2008 at 1:23 PM.
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1:29 AM
I too am sickened by the ability of humanity to do nothing even when a fellow man is dying before their eyes. The Fritzl case is yet another example of this uncaring cruelty. What many people do not realize however, is that there is a certain percentage of people that actually lack conscience, who cannot feel, and are thus capable of infinite cruelty. There is a growing body of important research into the existence and nature of psychopaths in our society. Far from being rare, research indicated that about 4% of the population lacks normal conscience and feeling. It seems clear that Josep Fritzl is one of them. Perhaps if people became more aware of the nature of these psychopaths, who often rise to high positions in society and are able to implement their cruel agendas that affect millions of people, humanity might have a chance to stop the endless wars and cruelty. More information, can be found here.
Thanks for your post.