The Most Useless Awakening in History

He thought about the stroller from minutes ago, the mother shaking with her child in her arms. He thought about all the people he had seen in warehouse aisles, on rain-soaked highway shoulders, beside trash stations, people whose lives were always one blocked line away from becoming somebody else’s tragedy. He thought about how many times a hero convoy had blocked him from a perimeter just because he was not the center of the shot. “I don’t know if I’ll ever be the kind of hero everybody wants to follow,” he said. “But if something’s about to crush somebody, I don’t want to be the guy standing there watching.” No one believed that line right away.