Large Fierce Mammal

Attitude and actions – of the two, which is more important? I would posit that actions, being a physical manifestation of attitude, are what truly matters. If you are smart but pretend to be stupid, then to the rest of humanity, your net effect on the world is that of one who is stupid. Thus, you will be effectively stupid, and treated as such, until you choose not to be. Similarly, if you choose to assemble your reality out of of half understood truths, half truths, and falsehoods you have accepted as truths, your actions will be inappropriate and ineffective when measured against the real state of affairs.

Take, for example, a skill far too important to be taken lightly – how to recognize when someone is drowning:

The new captain jumped from the deck, fully dressed, and sprinted through the water. A former lifeguard, he kept his eyes on his victim as he headed straight for the couple swimming between their anchored sportfisher and the beach. “I think he thinks you’re drowning,” the husband said to his wife. They had been splashing each other and she had screamed but now they were just standing, neck-deep on the sand bar. “We’re fine; what is he doing?” she asked, a little annoyed. “We’re fine!” the husband yelled, waving him off, but his captain kept swimming hard. ”Move!” he barked as he sprinted between the stunned owners. Directly behind them, not 10 feet away, their 9-year-old daughter was drowning. Safely above the surface in the arms of the captain, she burst into tears, “Daddy!”

How did this captain know—from 50 feet away—what the father couldn’t recognize from just 10? Drowning is not the violent, splashing call for help that most people expect. The captain was trained to recognize drowning by experts and years of experience. The father, on the other hand, had learned what drowning looks like by watching television. If you spend time on or near the water (hint: that’s all of us) then you should make sure that you and your crew know what to look for whenever people enter the water. Until she cried a tearful, “Daddy,” she hadn’t made a sound. As a former Coast Guard rescue swimmer, I wasn’t surprised at all by this story. Drowning is almost always a deceptively quiet event. The waving, splashing, and yelling that dramatic conditioning (television) prepares us to look for is rarely seen in real life.

That excerpt is from an excellent article titled Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning, written by retired Coast Guardsman Mario Vittone and published yesterday on Slate. You can read it in its sobering and hopefully educational entirety by clicking the article’s title.

You’ll learn the difference between Instinctive Drowning Response, aquatic distress, and art imitating death; i. e., television; along with other Truths. For example (citing U. S, statistics):

To get an idea of just how quiet and undramatic from the surface drowning can be, consider this: It is the No. 2 cause of accidental death in children, ages 15 and under (just behind vehicle accidents)—of the approximately 750 children who will drown next year, about 375 of them will do so within 25 yards of a parent or other adult. According to the CDC, in 10 percent of those drownings, the adult will actually watch the child do it, having no idea it is happening. Drowning does not look like drowning ….

Summer encroaches with more fun seekers in and on the water than at any other time of year. Some of them will matter to you. Take a few moments out of your Wednesday to get a bit wiser.