So, that Oklahoma State parade crash, right? You hear about these things, and it’s always a gut punch. Instantly, everyone’s got an opinion, everyone’s an expert, or at least they act like it online.
First thing I always notice is the usual mess. News flashes, then they walk some of it back, then there’s more chaos. You get people screaming on social media, blaming this person, that policy, whatever. It’s like a script they follow every single time something awful happens. My first step, always, is to just try and pull back from that initial wave of noise.
I started by trying to piece together what actually happened, not what people were just yelling about. I looked for the early reports, sure, but then I waited. I always wait. Let the dust settle a bit. Let the official channels say something, anything, that isn’t just pure speculation. It’s a slow burn, this kind of information gathering, not like grabbing the first juicy headline you see. It’s my way of doing things.
- I usually pull up a few different news sources – and I mean different, not just the same story from five big outlets.
- I look for any witness accounts that seem, well, less hysterical. More grounded.
- Then I try my best to filter out the outright political grandstanding that always, always pops up within minutes.
It’s a grim process, if I’m being honest. You’re sifting through tragedy, trying to find some tiny piece of fact. And you start to see patterns after a while, you really do. The same kind of failures often, the same kind of heartbreak every time.
So why do I even bother going through all this? Why this method when most folks just react?
Well, it’s not because I’m some kind of super-sleuth or anything. It’s because of something that happened to me a good while back. Totally unrelated to parade crashes, you’d think, but it completely changed how I look at these big, messy public tragedies and the news around them.
See, I used to run a small local festival. Just a community thing, you know? Street fairs, local bands, that kind of deal. For years, I was the one juggling the permits, the vendors, the volunteers, the whole shebang. And let me tell you, the amount of stuff that almost goes wrong, stuff the public never, ever sees, is absolutely terrifying.
There was this one year, we had this stage, a temporary thing, put up by a contractor who swore up and down it was solid as a rock. Looked fine, passed a quick glance. Hours before we were set to open, I was doing a final walk-through, just a weird gut feeling, and I leaned on one of the main supports. The whole damn thing wobbled. I mean, it seriously swayed. We were just hours from having a live band on it, and a crowd of people right in front.
We had to scramble like madmen. Got another crew in, emergency call, and they worked like crazy to reinforce it. Cost a fortune we didn’t really have, and it made us late opening that section of the festival. People complained, of course. They were annoyed about the delay. Nobody had a clue they were actually complaining about not being potentially crushed or seeing a major incident. The local paper, if they’d even bothered to write more than a tiny blurb, would have just said “minor delays at festival opening.” They wouldn’t have known the real story, the near miss, the panic.
That experience, man, it just burned itself into my brain. This idea that what you see on the surface, especially when a crisis hits, is almost never the full picture. And those quick judgments, the instant blame game? Usually way off base, or missing the tiny, critical details that actually matter – the things that could prevent it from happening next time.
So now, when something like that Oklahoma parade thing happens, or any major incident, my brain just automatically switches into that mode. Slow down, filter everything, look for what’s not being said as much as what is. It’s not a fun practice, not at all, but it feels… necessary. For my own sanity, maybe. To not get swept up in the immediate, often totally wrong, narrative that forms.
It’s not about being cynical all the time, not entirely. It’s more about understanding that things are often a lot more fragile, a lot more complex, than they appear from the outside looking in. And that official story? Sometimes it’s just the story they want you to hear, or the easiest one to tell, not the one that actually went down in all its messy detail. Just like with my wobbly stage – the “official” version would have been “everything was fine, just a minor hiccup.” The reality was a disaster narrowly averted by sheer dumb luck and a last-minute, frantic effort.
