On Jan. 2, the Kaua‘i Lifeguard Association proudly ran a half-page newspaper ad in The Garden Island, which included the true statement that “Kaua‘i had our best statistical ocean safety year in recorded history.” Since then, as we all know,
On Jan. 2, the Kaua‘i Lifeguard Association proudly ran a half-page newspaper ad in The Garden Island, which included the true statement that “Kaua‘i had our best statistical ocean safety year in recorded history.”
Since then, as we all know, we’ve been pummeled with possibly the worst ocean safety month in Kaua‘i’s recorded history.
We have all experienced and witnessed nothing short of utter ocean unsafety and havoc, resulting in tragedy for six families.
The word hubris comes from Greek tragedies that were written some 2,500 years ago. A typical plot is about a very decent man — often a full-on king of a small kingdom — who works very hard at caring for his people, and his kingdom prospers under his skillful and kind leadership.
The man can’t help but grow in confidence and stature, comfortable that he’s doing a good job with his life and his work. And here is where the word hubris (pride) enters the drama.
Well, we all know the saying “Pride comes before a fall.”
A parallel plot in the tragedy shows the gods up on Mount Olympus seeing things differently from how our king sees them.
They know that they are the ones who, with a well-timed puff of wind from on high, altered the course of an arrow by an inch or two a few years before — when the young prince was enjoying a sporting expedition with some youthful friends. And it was this puff that saved the prince from being killed by the arrow, before he ever became king.
And so the gods go about teaching the king the real truth about how life works, in the process bringing him to ruin and his kingdom to chaos. At the tragedy’s end our king — although ruined — has gained wisdom, and the world is better for that.
After 2012, and now with our own tragic start to 2013, KLA is experiencing some elements of this hubris story.
In our ad we displayed too much pride in our good statistical year, and in our thinking that maybe our efforts had something to do with it.
God, or the gods, or the ocean, have brought us to our knees and along with the suffering they have helped us gain clarity and perspective.
The first thing we’ve learned is that statistics are a false mistress and are not the end goal. People are. Of course, we would all love to see our decades-long average of eight to 10 drownings per year drop by 50 percent or more.
This is because we know what the statistics represent — they do represent people, families.
But our end goal can’t and shouldn’t be a statistical goal, worthy as that may seem.
Our end goal and our effort has to be to ensure that people, one by one, are offered a maximal opportunity to get good information about our ocean and our beaches, their allure and their dangers.
If, as a result of this effort, the statistics turn our way one day, that will be wonderful and it will represent saved people and families.
But even if they don’t turn our way, our work is to keep that statistic from being whatever number it is plus one.
We need to eliminate that plus one.
That is our end goal, our mission.
A second thing we’ve learned is that it’s OK, even in our beaten down condition and even with our six stricken families, to celebrate the terrific things that have been going on in ocean safety.
We can celebrate our lifeguards and the hundreds of rescues and hundreds of thousands of preventions they perform every year. We can celebrate people like Elijah Frank, Sunny Belcher, Chris Kanahele — local beachgoers who in the last year have saved people from certain death.
We can celebrate Jim Jung and his traveling informational booth that has helped so many people understand what they need to know about rip currents.
We can celebrate our rescue tube maintenance team for the 60 documented times that our rescue tubes have come in very handy in life-and-death situations.
Our KLA team, officers, board members, sponsors, donors and partners will lick our wounds and we will keep our minds and our hearts and our efforts focused on our mission.
We will look for and find ways to get good ocean safety information out there. We have some very specific programs that we are working hard on even as I write this piece, and you will hear about them as they become reality.
KLA can do more. The county can do more. The state can do more.
In the meantime we believe that we have never, ever seen so many Kauaians so alert and so determined about giving our visitors and friends good ocean safety information. (In example “Please swim near a Lifeguard”. Please check out today’s conditions at kauaiexplorer.com”).
This is a terrific grassroots foundation for all the more organized work that needs to be done.
Humbled, we thank each and every one of you for what you do in this regard.
And humbled, we pray that what KLA continues to do will help some people not get into trouble and will help some families to remain intact.
• Dr. Monty Downs is president of the Kaua‘i Lifeguard Association and an emergency room doctor at Wilcox Memorial Hospital.
