Elsewhere on the internet, I posted a link in a news thread. The headline: "Local lawyer's office obliterated by early-morning blast." This is in Edison, New Jersey. I know the lawyer in question - I went to school with his daughter, and my father once fender-bender'd their cars together.
The destruction was amazing. The front door of the house landed a hundred feet away, crossing all four lanes of Rt. 27; the area was covered in debris, after the house was launched into the air and blasted to pieces; the original site of house itself was a smoldering crater; the windows of the houses on either side were absolutely gone, and the fireball had been hot enough to make their aluminum siding run like wax. It's like something out of Kabul's morning news, right?
It was just a utilities problem. The energy company had guys on the scene working feverishly to isolate and close off a gas leak. But after an hour and a half, there was some spark inside the house, and it all just went off.
Total number killed: absolutely none.
Total number seriously injured: absolutely none.
The three guys from Public Service Electric & Gas (our local utility co.), who were standing not twenty feet away from the house when it blew out and went airborne? "Mildly injured", which I take to mean flash burns, cuts and scrapes, maybe busted eardrums or nosebleeds or mTBI, things characteristic of exposure to blast waves.
Nobody obviously seriously hurt. Think about that. Now, maybe the chances aren't that high that someone standing twenty feet away from a house in the act of blowing itself to pieces will be scythed in half by flying timbers, I don't know. But it stuns the imagination, doesn't it? That's what I'd call a miracle. The world has violated our understanding of the way things work, in a positive and beneficial way.
There are a lot of things that are amazing like that, though, if you stop and think about it. Technological progress in the past century and a half has been pretty amazing, though we take most of that for granted these days; but it goes beyond that. You want to see something amazing? Look at your hand.
It doesn't matter what color it is, what size or shape it is, how many fingers it has, even whether it is made of flesh and bone or wood and plastic and metal. The thing itself is the wonder. That's an immensely-complicated machine that, with the proper musculature, can crush metal cans or support the weight of an entire human being... or perform the most delicate surgery, or the gentlest caress. Amazing!
The flight of birds in the air above you, too. How remarkable it is that you should breathe one way, with your two-stroke lungs, and that birds should have four-stroke lungs - how odd! Who could have imagined that? Amazing! It's a miracle.
If you think about it, you are a miracle, your friends are miracles. The entire human species is pretty miraculous - think about how poorly-built we are, and yet we have survived for what, fifty thousand years so far? That's a miracle. No other word for it.
And hey, if you think about it a second more... what makes our lives miraculous, in their way, is how fragile our existing order always is. We ride the razor's edge. A little too warm or a little too cold, and our bodies stop working. Same with pH, salt concentration, hell, you name it and getting it out of whack can mess you up. Let's not even talk about having a house explode less than a stone's throw away from you.
Life's a pretty delicate thing, you know? It's pretty amazing, but it's pretty delicate. I wish more people would keep the amazingness, and the fragility, of life in mind when making decisions. Especially human life.