Perhaps in a reaction to the tragic sights and sounds related to the Japan earthquake that I’ve seen during the past 24 hours, I made a conscious decision today to NOT be a “citizen journalist” when disaster struck in front of me.

I was driving along a busy back-road, heading home from an appointment, when a black SUV ahead of me spun into the oncoming traffic lane to our left, and struck a vehicle coming the other way. The SUV flipped over on impact and both vehicles skidded to a halt near the shoulder of the road.

I pulled over to the side of the road and immediately dialed 9-1-1. I watched other people scramble to each of the damaged vehicles, checking on the occupants. After providing the location and other details to the 9-1-1- operator, I got out of my Jetta TDI and started to head toward the SUV.

Right then, I noticed another person starting to hold up traffic on the other side of the accident. I decided to do the same on my side of the accident. We took turns alternating between holding up our lane of cars to allow the other person to signal their line of cars to move along the one open lane of traffic.

In a few minutes, I heard the sirens of approaching emergency vehicles and police cars. Once they arrived, I checked that they didn’t need my help, and then left.

As I was walking back to my car, I scanned the accident scene, focusing on the accident victims who were receiving medical treatment. For a brief moment, I thought about taking out my mobile phone and capturing some of the action.

That’s what a “citizen journalist” probably would have done. The images could be sent to the local media, or used on a blog post like this one. I would have received a photo credit, and maybe someone who knows me would tell me that they saw the photo. It’s happened before.

But like I said at the beginning of this post, two things kept me from taking those photos. The first was knowing that the Internet currently is overflowing with images and videos taken by witnesses to the largest earthquake to hit Japan in recorded history. We’ve seen enough death and destruction today, haven’t we?

The second was the momentary eye contact that I made with the middle-aged woman who sat next to the SUV, holding a bandage to her bleeding scalp, as a paramedic worked on her other injuries. She was dazed, and I felt that her expression as our eyes met was communicating something like, “Help, am I going to be okay”?

My journalism training taught me to disassociate myself from an event, so that I could view it with a lessened (I’ll never say complete lack of) personal bias. That would have helped me to snap a photo of the injured woman, even as she looked at me.

I didn’t do that this time. Instead, as I was driving home, I said a prayer for the people involved in the accident.

I think I helped them more that way, and the blogosphere won’t miss those photos very much.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 12th, 2011 at 11:22 am and is filed under blogging, faith, journalism, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.