Transcript
A (0:06)
Pushkin, maybe you remember it. August 2003, everything went dark. A couple of trees on the Eastlake transmission line outside of Cleveland grew a little bit too tall, and the electrical line at that precise point, perhaps because of the summer heat, sagged a little bit more than usual and touched the trees. Contact caused a short. The short caused the power that used to run along that line to be rerouted along another line, which overloaded that line, causing an even bigger electrical surge to be rerouted to another line and on and on, leading to a series of failures that rippled across the entire northeastern grid, leaving 50 million people without electricity. The great Northeastern blackout is what's called a failure cascade. One small mishap leads to a second, bigger problem and a third, even bigger problem. And finally, at the end of the chain catastrophe, I want to tell you a story about a moral failure cascade. It began with what looked like a robbery gone wrong. A woman murdered in her home in an area of northwestern Alabama known as the Shoals. But that crime would soon attract a crowd, a host of others who would get caught up in the cascade as it picked up momentum. Onlookers, participants, people trying to stop the unfolding catastrophe for 30 years. People wittingly or unwittingly, feeding it until it consumed them, too. Was he. Was he a good preacher?
B (2:08)
Charismatic? Yes, I would say very charismatic.
C (2:11)
There was this joke that said that it was easier to get forgiveness in the Church of Christ for murdering somebody than it was to be divorced.
B (2:22)
Thank you. Just got home from work, and he called me and he said, well, mom, can you come? He said, the police are here.
D (2:30)
There's no sense in even having a jury if you're going to be able to overturn the jury, if a judge can overturn the jury. He said, but I was involved, and that's a horrible thing I was involved in. I've been in prison 24, 25 years. That's probably not long enough. I didn't kill them.
E (2:54)
They get burned from the inside, and then blood just pours into the lungs. And I'm sorry. As I'm saying this, it's awful. And this is what. This is how lethal injection actually kills you.
A (3:10)
Here's what I don't understand. Nobody noticed this till you.
E (3:14)
Apparently not.
F (3:16)
He would say to himself, turn to the right, to the victim's family, and apologize. Turn to the left. Tell my family I love him. So he had this little practice. To the right. I'm sorry. To the left. I love you.