Nik Wallenda: Crazyman
You heard what this guy is doing this weekend in Chicago?
Tightrope walking.
50 stories up.
Partial incline.
Blindfolded for some of it.
In "The Windy City", for Pete's sake!
I'll bet your weekend's not gonna be anywhere near as exciting as the one Nik Wallenda is gonna have.
Take a read thru what he has to say about the challenge:
(note: Nik has already tightroped across both the Grand Canyon and Niagra Falls)
And don't miss Chicago Tribune columnist Rex Huppke's take on this whole thing (scroll down a little ways).
The best line:
I hope nothing bad happens, and I wish Wallenda nothing but good fortune. But if walking a tightrope some 600 feet in the air above the Chicago River is heroic, then so is sticking your face in a fan. And dying while doing something that would make any logical person think, "I better not do that, I might die," isn't a tragedy — it's just dying, and kind of dumb dying at that.
Crazy, Nik, CRAZY.
Out for now.......
Matt
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Wallenda's Tightrope Walk Isn't Heroic, It's Dumb
by Rex Huppke, Chicago Tribune
If everything goes as planned, a human being will spend part of Sunday evening walking a tightrope stretched between two Chicago high-rises.
I, on the other hand, will spend part of Sunday evening stretched between two — or possibly three — low-rise sofa cushions, happily not watching that human being risk his life.
There's a simple reason for that. I think what daredevil Nik Wallenda is doing — an event that will be nationally broadcast, much like his last death-defying walk across a gorge near the Grand Canyon — is remarkably stupid.
If humans were meant to walk across a city on narrow wires hundreds of feet in the air, God wouldn't have invented taxis. (I assume our bodies would also be made of rubber, or possibly cotton.)
What worries me most about this event isn't the fate of the walker but the possibility that people will attach the term "heroic" to Wallenda and, in the event something dreadful happens, describe his fall as "a tragedy."
Let's be clear, I hope nothing bad happens, and I wish Wallenda nothing but good fortune. But if walking a tightrope some 600 feet in the air above the Chicago River is heroic, then so is sticking your face in a fan. And dying while doing something that would make any logical person think, "I better not do that, I might die," isn't a tragedy — it's just dying, and kind of dumb dying at that.
We have a tendency to conflate actual acts of heroism — soldiers parachuting into a war zone or firefighters running into a burning building — with things that are bold but, in the end, purposeless.
Same with tragedies. We hear about adventurous souls who die trying to climb Mount Everest and think, "Oh, that's so tragic."
No, it's not. It's unfortunate. It's sad that those people are gone. But at the end of the day, they were the ones who decided to climb something not meant for climbing.
Consider Austrian sky diver Felix Baumgartner, who in 2012 made a 24-mile leap from a capsule, breaking the sound barrier on his descent.
That was a really dumb thing to do. I have to imagine that birds looked up at Baumgartner and said, "Hey, get a load of this idiot," and birds aren't the brightest of creatures.
Had the plummeting Austrian met the ground at a higher speed than he planned, there would have been endless cries about the tragedy of his death. But when you jump from a vessel 24 miles above the Earth, dying is not tragic, it's the logical outcome of your irrational decision.
Astronauts who explore space for the benefit of humanity are heroic, and when astronauts die, it's tragic. But no astronaut ever jumped from the space shuttle as it was leaving the atmosphere, probably because any self-respecting astronaut knows that's not a very smart thing to do.
If I announce plans to wade into a pool of lava, I wouldn't expect anyone to find it tragic when all that's left of me are half a torso and a head. I would expect people to say, "Wow, that half-torso guy is a Grade-A nincompoop."
Going back to Wallenda, who is 35 and should know better, his stunt actually consists of two equally stupid parts.
The first will be the walk between the Marina City west tower and the Leo Burnett Building. That rates plenty high on the stupid-o-meter.
But after that, according to a story by my colleague Stacy St. Clair, he will "ride an elevator down to the street and return to the west tower, where he plans to be blindfolded as he crosses to the east tower on a tightrope."
Blindfolded? Now you're just being ridiculous,Wallenda. I'm not even going to use my stupid-o-meter to measure that. It would probably break.
Wallenda said in the story that Mother Nature is "really the one thing that we can't control." But the primary thing he can control are his feet and, if those feet were mine, I would use them to run away from the tightrope as quickly as possible and find a place where I'm unlikely to fall, possibly the sidewalk, as long as it's not too close to the curb.
Sadly, Wallenda doesn't think the way I and other death-averse people think. He comes from a long line of folks who disrespect the law of gravity, and he perseveres even though a number of the famed Flying Wallendas have perished.
I sincerely hope Nik Wallenda isn't the next to go. But in the event that he is, let's be realistic about the path he chose and the nature of his death.
The headlines shouldn't read: "Heroic daredevil dies in tightrope tragedy; city mourns."
They should read: "Guy doing something that could logically lead to death dies; city not particularly surprised."
