We arrived this week as I write to find a silent shroud of snow covering the town of Crans, Montana, which we visited as part of our Innocents Abroad (with an Epic Pass) tour. Crans was on the calendar before the tragic event, that took the lives of so many young people in the terrible fire here on New Years Day.
We also encountered a memorial to the victims in Geneva near The Broken Chair. This larger memorial is raised to the innocent victims of land mines left behind in various territorial skirmishes around the world. It’s really a paean to empathy, which is the core principle of any memorial.
It’s also the principle behind Mark Twain’s statement from his book “Innocents Abroad”: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.”
We find a remaining pall of sadness and remembrance for the victims in Crans as seen on the T-shirt worn by our waiter, which had a red heart on the dark shit over his heart.
The city fathers of Crans have stepped up to their failure to inspect the bar for more than five years. Empathy causes humans to own and correct for their mistakes.
The Romans built aqueducts that still stand to avoid the tragedy of cholera, even though they didn’t know what cholera was. Surely, we can build bars that won’t burst into flames and create rules that prevent people from blasting flammable ceilings with Roman candles.
Yet, we need to survive this moment of pain. Perhaps we can inure ourselves to these moments as Paul Simon sang, “A rock feels no pain. And an island never cries.”
But also, so the meaning won’t be lost or misconstrued, we should follow the lead of the city fathers of Crans, Montana, and make sure that things like this won’t be repeated. Our empathy demands this of us as human beings.
Also, as in Crans, a good dump of the white stuff helps to bring us out of our funk. Let it snow!
Sandy Brumley
Park City