Christmas Candle

I was pretty depressed when I got up. 12:00 p.m., raining. It was the first proper rain of the year, I think.

I was scrolling Twitter when I saw a woman burnt alive on a New York subway train. The cops walked by, and the bystanders took out their phones with a proficiency that anthropologists might assume is instinctual. One man seemed like he was trying to help, fanning his jacket a couple of meters away. It didn’t work. Later, it turns out he might be the perpetrator who set the woman on fire in the first place.

Even the woman herself, standing and ablaze, didn’t seem to care. Movies and video games made me believe that a person on fire would run around screaming at the top of their lungs or roll on the ground in a furtive attempt to put themselves out. If they showed someone standing perfectly still while on fire, people would say it’s unrealistic. Perhaps the directors and developers never actually saw a woman set on fire before.

Nothing in this video made any sense. The indifference of the cops, the apathy of the bystanders, even the lack of reaction of the woman herself, like a human-shaped Christmas candle.

Even how quickly I got over the horrible images I just saw. As instinctively as the bystanders who pulled out their phones, I scrolled on. Behind the screen, the world’s brightest scientists and fastest supercomputers have picked out the worst things it has to offer. A garbage “hot take,” some stupid mobile game ads, a selfie with an attention-seeking caption…The bystanders, the city, the algorithm, and I have boarded the next train as the woman’s charred body slowly faded away from view.

On that note, Merry Christmas.