Catharsis by generosity: the miracle of the Dan Wheldon Memorial Auction
by Tony Johns on Nov 8, 2011 3:18 PM EST
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If I were to summarize the news lately, I could probably rewrite the entirety of the 1990s Billy Joel song "We Didn't Start the Fire" from the events of the past month alone.
Granted, Lindsay Lohan and Kim Kardashian do not carry the kind of historical weight as thalidomide or the fall of Dien Bien Phu. But man, does it ever seem like there's plenty of reasons to think our race is doomed to an ignominious and stupid end in the very near future.
I'm not writing about that crap.
I'm writing about something positive. Ironically enough, it is a direct result of a major tragedy and the only thing that many IndyCar writers and fans have had to talk about lately - the tragically early demise of Dan Wheldon.
By now you've probably guessed that I'm speaking of the ongoing Dan Wheldon Memorial Auction that has essentially taken the sports world by storm. Not in the headlines, mind you - but in the community, the response to it has been more than just startling.
Graham Rahal, the fellow who kicked this all off by offering to auction his helmet for Wheldon's family, has found himself at the center of a hurricane-force windfall of goodwill. How much goodwill? Enough to raise over a quarter-million dollars in the space of less than a month.
The generosity is overwhelming, no matter how you look at it. And it's coming from all over, not just from within the racing community. Sure, there are racing stars donating items, and their names are the cream of the racing crop - but there are items coming in from artists, actors, and even fans that were totally unsolicited.
It's a response that, if I'm being frank, is disproportionate to need. But still the items come, still they sell for astonishing amounts of money. It's as though Graham's helmet was a crack in a giant dam, and once the water started flowing there was no way to stop it.
Why is this? To my way of thinking, it goes beyond mere generosity and the desire to help a fellow human being, although they are the greatest and most worthy motivators. No, there is more behind it than that. It seems to be an excuse to indulge in something more than self-interest, a justification to embrace every philanthropic impulse that simply needed a cause to find full expression.
It is as though there is a communal drive to give that has been crying for release. In today's society there are so many causes that abound, almost all of them worthy of support, that the sheer number of choices can overwhelm people who are not directly affected by them. Then, too, in a down economy it is hard for people to part with money that suddenly is necessary for elemental needs instead of luxuries.
In that respect, the simple idea of a widow and her children suffering from a loss with an uncertain future in store became a catalyst. In place of money, people sent things - items they knew had value for someone else. Those donating overcame their sentimental attachments to the items themselves, and those purchasing found a legitimate justification to spend their money on them - sometimes in amounts that are clearly beyond the actual item value.
It is, then, a catharsis as much as it is an outpouring of generous spirit. Faced with an overpowering sense that man's inhumanity to man is a foregone conclusion - a feeling reinforced with every tragic news story, every hateful demonstration, every political stab in the back, every public train wreck that fuels the worldwide news cycle - a chunk of the human race took the Wheldon family's need and used it as a battering ram to knock down the oppressive walls surrounding their own hearts.
The results are incredible, unbelievable, mind-boggling. They also give us hope that humanity can still be united in good causes, that people can rise above petty differences in belief or paradigm to embrace each other in a spirit of goodwill.
So as you surf the news tonight, wondering if the human family has any better angels left in their nature, sit back and ponder what happened when a young race driver accidentally gave us all an excuse to do something great. There is hope for us yet.
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What impresses me is that the "divisions" between the racing leagues - Indycar, F1, NASCAR - were nonexistent in mourning this tragedy.
A football player may individually wax nostalgic about a basketball player that has passed (or vice versa), and a hockey player may eulogize a baseball player from his memories of his youth. But the racing disciplines all mourned Dan as their own, despite being in different series.
Nobody is innocent of playing The Tribal Game regarding other series. I myself am guilty of doing it quite often in regards to NASCAR. But it was heartening and incredible to see so many Cup drivers mourn and embrace Wheldon as a brother, not merely as a tragedy in some sport “over there, away from us”. I’d go so far as to bet that a casual viewer seeing Jimmie Johnson, or the Talladega tribute would actually not realize that Wheldon did not drive a stock car.
There were no divisions where this tragedy was concerned. There was only the racing family, however extended it may have been.
And to merge back onto topic: Catharsis. The generosity sparked by Graham Rahal’s wonderful, completely unselfish act is an incredible thing. However, it’s only the first step. So much will converge to remind everyone of this, from other short ovals to seeing a different signee drive the Go Daddy car for Andretti. For a good part of the next year, any spin, any wreck, and (heaven forbid it should happen, but nothing’s impossible) any car getting airborne for whatever reason will flash the tragedy back to our minds with force and remind us of what happened back then. Catharsis unfortunately is only one of the steps of healing, and such healing is not achieved by any one event, nevermind how incredible and generous is is, nor is it achieved so soon after a tragedy, ancient Greek philosophy nonwithstanding. Rather, it’ll be a process of various events that will eventually lead to a tampering of the pain, and a blunting of the visceral impact of the horror. We’ll have to see another wreck – and make no mistake, one will happen; this is no nanny sport, and no human is perfect at 200 MPH – and wait breathlessly for the driver to climb out and wave at the crowd before releasing our renewed fears and recalling how rare deaths are in racing. We’ll have to see our first – and perhaps second, third, and fourth – 1.5 mile track run before we’ll unclench our teeth and remember that drivers have raced these before and will race them again, and walk away unharmed. We’ll have to watch these cars over and over and over again before the chassis designation truly becomes the cars’ names and not the painful reminder of why they’re named such. And we’ll have to just immerse in the mundanity of the events – the timings, the quarrels, the pit mistakes, the qualifying bobbles, the anthems sung well and ill, the boring and the exciting exhortations to Start Your Engines, and all the little rituals of the races that permeate our brains but didn’t stand out as anything other than signposts along the event until we suddenly became aware of the tenuousness of it all – before we stop and realize “Hey. I just went a whole race without thinking of that God awful wreck in Vegas”. We’ll have to live a little bit and have our own, personal catharses, one, two, a dozen at a time, all in little steps before we’re once again plain old Indycar fans, with the same old gripes and the same old cheers we had before that ugly day where Dan was lost.
Catharsis. Healing. We know we’ll get there. But we also see that road to that first race next year, that first vision of that new car running the roads, and that first good, happy cry of relief to see a car go sideways but not kill its driver before all those little fears and pains are expunged. God bless Rahal for bravely and unselfishly giving everyone that first step. Now we all have to take our own on that path to being upright again.
But we’ll still never be the same, never be 100%. Because somewhere, at sometime, touched off by some small thing, we’ll remember that a couple of little kids are going to grow up being told how wonderful their daddy is in the past tense while knowing their mother’s holding back tears at the very same thought. And it’ll all come back in a wave when we do that. How well everyone heals will depend on how positively we handle that, and how well respect that daddy’s legacy for his kids sake.
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"First they came for the ugly, and I did not speak out because I was not ugly.
Then they came for the nerds, and I did not speak out because D&D IS A RESPECTABLE GAME WITH A LARGE PLAYERBASE OK MOM???
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because let's be real they always come for the Jews.
Then they came for me, and I did not speak out because they actually came for me back when they came for the nerds."
--
"How can a pickup truck contain enough mass to unfold into a towering machine? I say if Ringling Brothers can get 15 clowns into a Volkswagen, anything is possible."
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