Mistakes People Make

I’ve often said that if I get killed because some idiot does something stupid, like lights a cigarette next to his oxygen tank and blows up his house when I happen to be walking by, I will come back and haunt them forever!  

But I won’t of course because I’ll be too busy taking harp lessons and trying to get some face time with Gilda Radner and Humphrey Bogart.

Bad things happen, good people suffer, it’s a fact of life we would all love to eradicate.  Last week former NHL player Rob Ramage, who served time for driving drunk and getting into a crash that killed his friend, Keith Magnuson, was promoted to Assistant Coach of the London Knights.  Ramage is from London – here in Byron in fact – he played for the Knights when he was young and this job marks his official return to work.

By all accounts, Rob Ramage is a good guy who made a terrible mistake.  He will have to live with it.  Magnuson’s family has forgiven him and even asked the judge in his case to not send him to jail. They wanted him sentenced to a speaking tour to talk to kids about the dangers of drinking and driving.   This is how it works.  Nothing can bring Keith back so the system decides on a penalty, the person pays it and they get to go on with their lives.  Some have suggested it’s a bad move to put Ramage in a position of authority after what he has done.  I disagree.  He did his time, literally. Maybe he can set a good example this time.

Now take the two RIM executives who got so blasted drunk on a flight from Toronto to Beijing last week that the 777 was turned around.  The Air Canada plane was already past Alaska when the flight crew made a group decision that the unruly and out-of-control men were a flight risk, and went back to Vancouver to land.  Because the non-stop flight was so long, the delay put the crew over the allowable flight-time limit so everyone had to stay overnight.  314 passengers and 17 crew were frightened and inconvenienced because two a–holes couldn’t stop drinking and behave.  They’ve been fired and they have each been fined more than $35,000 by Air Canada.  They’re banned from flying and last anyone heard they had rented a car to drive back east.

There is no way for them to really make right what they did.  Yup, no one died.  But it was almost a terrorist act because people were in terror.  You simply do not mess with the safety of an airplane, not anymore.  These two twerps deserve a punch to the stomach, or a slap to the face, by every passenger on that plane.

I’m not really comparing what Ramage did to what the two execs with an expense account did.  You can’t. The death of a man through the negligence of his best friend is unfathomable.  It happened and it has been dealt with in the way our society has deemed appropriate.   But no matter what penalty has been placed on the drunk fliers, those guys are free to be giant tools at large forever.   And that just doesn’t seem right.