“Every_Thing” is Avoidable, but “Everything” is Not

My partner and I watched the Wednesday morning news in horror as a witness detailed the death of a fellow airline passenger. Jennifer Riordan was killed when one engine of a Southwest Airlines plane came apart and broke a window on the fuselage. Riordan was violently sucked against the window and had to be pulled back in by other passengers.

The scene is nightmarish to imagine and unbelievably cruel to those who were directly affected. It is so terrifying and unfair, in fact, that it nearly immediately forces each of us to consider the exact same question: Could it have been avoided?

Absolutely. There are things that could have been done differently that would have changed the course of events and kept this incident from occurring. For the sake of the hypothetical point, the easiest alternative to consider is that the entire engine, or even just the fan blade that eventually failed, could have been replaced prior to the flight.

It is possible, then, that something could have been done to avoid this terrible tragedy. The waters begin to muddy however, when we blur the lines between the concepts of “could” and “should”. Due to the extremely…