It looks straight out of an action flick: a YouTube video shows a man narrowly escaping a truck crashing through the door of Turk Telecom in Kastamonu, Turkey.
The truck driver apparently suffered a heart attack and died behind the wheel, losing control of his vehicle. The running man? He survived.
These kind of viral vids belong to a growing genre of narrow escape clips. You’ve seen them before: babies in strollers falling onto train tracks, zebras escaping a lion’s attack, even desperate drivers trying to stop their cars sliding on icy roads with their feet.
What compels us to flock to these videos? Perhaps we like seeing train wrecks, literally and figuratively, which explains the popularity of these vids’ predecessors such as the TV show COPS or World’s Most Amazing Videos on Spike. The near-misses give us some mild comfort in the face of random accidents. “Hey, if he survived that wild car crash, maybe we all have a chance.”
You could say these videos simply act as our glimpse into a world we don’t understand. How could that baby survive the oncoming train? We don’t get much explanation from the video, so our own theories pass as relevant hypotheses, picking apart words like “fate” and “divine intervention.” Some will say the survivors were lucky to cheat death, and others will say they’re playing with fire.
Seeing the Turk Telecom crash raises two main thoughts: What was going through that guy’s mind when he saw his life about to be snuffed out? And, how would I react? I instinctively place myself in that man’s shoes, as freaky as that fantasy is. I think it’s a useful exercise, albeit precautious to the point of paranoia. After all, you never know when you’ll be at the centre of a narrow-escape video clip.[rssbreak]
