There’s suspense, and then there’s real suspense. In the past two weeks we’ve been treated to both.
One was the extraordinarily prolonged (and manufactured) drama surrounding when someone would be appointed to fill Justice Anthony Kennedy’s seat on the Supreme Court. And who would fill it.
Of course, this entirely political story and its outcome was writ in stone the day Donald Trump was inaugurated. He would – he’d been promising for months – appoint the most conservative jurists he could find to fill any Supreme Court vacancies. In fact, he’d been waving around a list of potential justices, compiled by the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation, throughout his campaign, to be ready when a current member either retired or died. And he used it immediately to fill the vacancy that existed when he took office.
The only “suspense” about the whole thing was just how long into the president’s term it would take for a second vacancy to occur. When one did, Trump managed to transfix gullible reporters for weeks with his agonizingly tortured “indecision” before, finally, announcing the selection of another of his cookie-cutter choices.
The second drama – a heart-stopping, gut-wrenching one with real suspense – kicked off when, in Thailand, 12 teenage soccer players and their coach foolishly wandered into a massive cave just as monsoon rains were about to begin. Suddenly the rains poured down and – poof! – they all disappeared.
Over the next two weeks Americans along with the rest of the world learned what true suspense was.
At first, most people thought the team was just gone. The cave was known to be six miles long, twisted and barely passable in places in the best of circumstances. Surviving without food or water or even light? With monsoon rains pouring in, flooding the place?
But these were kids, the oldest just 16. The Thais – the world – just couldn’t give up on them, and would-be rescuers prepared to go in. They were joined by experienced cave divers from across the globe. They set up a growing camp, amassed supplies – especially a seemingly inexhaustible supply of oxygen canisters, hoses, pumps and heavy ropes – and planned strategies.
It seemed hopeless. For 10 days, there was no sign the boys had survived. But, tellingly, there were no signs that they hadn’t – no bodies, no floating debris, no bits and pieces of clothing – and the searchers, in shifts, extended their rope and cables, their hoses and oxygen canisters, further into the labyrinthine cave.
On the 11th day, two British cave divers among those who eagerly volunteered to help, popped up into a cavity more than two miles from the entrance, and their lights revealed the 12 boys and their young coach huddled together on an elevated outcropping, clearly startled – and happy – to see light and hear voices.
Now it was time for the would-be rescuers to get food and water to the marooned children and to formulate a realistic plan – which, as it happens, wasn’t an easy job. The children were exhausted, nutritionally spent and physically weak. Critically, not one could even swim, much less dive. And all would have to spend terrifying hours in water, often actually underwater, wearing unfamiliar and uncomfortable facial masks. And one volunteer diver himself had died, losing oxygen, while trying to help set up the rescue route.
The cave was a tortuous maze, unfamiliar to the diving community because it was so dangerous. Even the most experienced divers weren’t optimistic about their chances, sure that some if not most of the children could well not survive the ordeal.
Outside the cave, an intent international audience, including many of us here, focused on the suspenseful real life-or-death drama.
And then, finally, a week ago, the first four boys – heavily medicated to keep them from panicking in the water and tightly lashed to an experienced diver – emerged and were sped to a hospital. The next day, another arduous and exhausting effort found four more boys free and being cared for. On Tuesday the final four as well as their young coach – who was widely credited by rescuers with keeping the children alive and unpanicked – were rescued as well.
The children and their coach had, against all expectations, survived.
I’ve no doubt church bells or their equivalent pealed around the globe in celebration, as people gave thanks for a minor miracle – ordinary human beings who put their own lives at risk to save the lives of other ordinary human beings, children who deserved to live among people who loved them, not to die slow deaths in darkness and silence. And those selfless rescuers succeeded.
I don’t know how many of our world’s important leaders now debating the future fate of large and small nations knew this tiny drama was going on half a world away, much less whether they might have had the time or inclination to see bits of the on-going story in progress.
If so, they would have seen, first-hand, a vivid reminder of the bravery and generosity of so many of the ordinary people on whose collective behalf they’re supposed to be trying to arrange a safe, healthy and prosperous future.
These are people for whom they speak.
(“Monitor” columnist Katy Burns lives in Bow.”)