From the May 2008 Idaho Observer:

Imagine: You are walking down a tree-lined boulevard in a nice, safe residential neighborhood on a cloudless sunny day. All is quiet and calm and you go to cross the street. BLAM! You are blindsided by a bus speeding down the wrong side of the road. Fortunately, you remain conscious as it only knocked you down; it did not run you over.

What do you do? Look at the bus for identifying features as it’s speeding away so you can report the incident to the proper authorities later and wait for help? Do you immediately presume that you were hit by a random bolt of lightening? Or, do you just wait until a bus expert arrives to tell you that, whatever it was that hit you, it was probably not a bus?

Now imagine you are back to walking down the same safe, tree-lined boulevard on the same clear sunny day and you come across someone lying in the road as if he had been hit by a vehicle. You can see a bus driving down the road; there are no other vehicles in sight. The person is alive but obviously in pain. What do you do? Note any distinguishing features on the bus to help identify it later and immediately go over to help the injured person? Do you begin to theorize that it was not the bus at all that hit the person even if a random bolt of lightening is the only other possible explanation? Do you do nothing because you are not an expert at first aid or bus-induced people injuries? Or, do you just walk away because the bus didn’t hit you?

Within the framework of this metaphor, to be alive today is ourselves being hit by buses over and over and over gain; to watch others being hit by buses over and over and over again.

Our societal tendency is to avoid involvement in what does not affect us directly and rely on "experts" for opinions about everything outside our own areas of expertise.

I ask you again, if the bus was leaving the scene and there is a body, maybe even your own, laying in the middle of the road as if it had been hit by a bus, what do your instincts tell you about the bus?

Now, wasn’t that easy? Isn’t it weird to think that experts, who did not witness the event, could ask a lot of questions, take a bunch of measurements, perform a battery of tests and conclude that the injuries sustained were, indeed, caused by that very rare, unwitnessed and impossible to quantify, even mythical, bolt of lightening from a clear sky on a sunny day? (DWH)