ashman, the point is, he didn’t just walk away from two bombings having suffered nothing from them. He had two very traumatic experiences that caused severe injury, illness, and loss of family, friends, and probably his home and much of his community. Most of us would consider going through so much emotional and physical pain to be profoundly unlucky, even if we *were *lucky to escape with our lives. I bet he’d consider someone like, say, me, who has never suffered such pain and loss and probably never will, to be the lucky one. He beat tremendous odds to survive, and that isolated fact makes him lucky. When you take it in context, though, he is very unlucky, which is how I and I think many other posters here are evaluating the situation.
In short, we’re just using different definitions of the term “lucky.”
I’m with ashman. Despite what happened to him, even considering the lasting damages, he’s still alive at the age of 93, and while has traumatic, enduring scars (both physical and mental), he’s undoubtedly led a full life, and has a family.
Would it have been luckier for him to have died in the second blast?
I think it goes without saying that getting nuked twice, and all the residual side-effects that result in such a thing is BAD juju. But to come out of it alive… that’s just… wow. I’m sure he feels the same way.
Yes, we clearly are, which is, I think, the root of the problem. I tend to look at coming away from being hit with not one, but two, nuclear bombs with the wherewithal to recover and tell the tale to be pretty fucking lucky. You see, the way we look at luck is when something shouldn’t happen and does, or should happen and doesn’t. If it’s a bad thing, we say it’s unlucky. If it’s a nearly impossible bad thing, say, oh, being struck by lightning, while standing on a bridge that’s collapsing during a conversation with your doctor finding out you have a flesh eating bacteria you got from a dirty needle during your HIV test, which, oh by the way turned up positive, would be, I suppose, really, really un-fucking-lucky.
Landing on a mattress of feathers which happens to have the cure for both HIV and the flesh eating bacteria as well as the seemingly magical ability to reverse the electrical burns and shock to your system as well as protect you from the falling debris of the now fully collapsed bridge to such an extent you only get a concussion and some minor electrical scars would be, well, pretty fucking lucky. In each case, the odds of the event happening were astronomically slim, yet it happened.
Being twice nuked and surviving despite the horror and all that is preferable, I’d suggest, to just dying. And it would seem that the dude agrees with me considering he refers to it as his destiny to serve as a reminder to the world why we should get rid of nuclear weapons altogether. Which, I might add, he seems quite happy to do. He considers it, near as I can tell, to be a lucky turn of events. The alternatives were essentially to be vaporized with everyone else, or to die of radiation sickness, or, whatever. Yet he survived and lived a long, reasonably healthy life to complete what he considers his destiny. Maslow might even have a special place on a pyramid for such.
Anyway, yes, you and I have vastly different ideas of what makes one lucky. Yours deals with the shitty luck of having anything bad happen to you ever. Mine deals with what comes after it looking on it as a “well, I could have died but I’m really fucking thankful and lucky that I lived.” Miles apart. Perhaps we should have three or four threads on this: one of them could be named “the aesthetic luck”. =P
Stephen King. His mother was told she couldn’t have children and so adopted a child, only to conceive Stephen later, raised in poverty after his father walked out on the family, not only has he made millions and is insanely popular, he has a loving family and has survived massive drug use and being hit by a freaking van.
Would you please stop putting words in my mouth? I never said it was unlucky to have “anything bad happen to you ever”. I said it was unlucky to have something horrifically bad happen to you twice. I also agreed he *was * very lucky to survive. Distorting my viewpoint to the point of ridiculing me is really condescending and hostile. Please stop. We could be having an interesting and pleasant exchange of viewpoints otherwise.