In the grand, rotting theater of human existence, we have a peculiar, almost pathological penchant for finding 'miracles' in the wreckage of our own systemic incompetence. The latest script—a masterpiece of grim irony—involves a six-year-old girl, a train, and the sudden, violent deletion of her entire support system. The headlines, predictably, have latched onto the word 'miracle' with the desperation of a drowning man grasping at a razor blade. Because, naturally, when four people are pulverized by thousands of tons of indifferent steel, the fact that one small human was left walking barefoot on the tracks with only three stitches is proof of a benevolent universe, rather than a horrifying glitch in the cosmic slaughterhouse.

Let’s examine the mathematics of this divine intervention, shall we? On one side of the ledger, we have a mother, a father, a brother, and a cousin—entire lives, histories, and potential futures extinguished in the time it takes for a locomotive to ignore a braking signal. On the other side, we have a traumatized child and three stitches in a head that will, for the rest of its natural life, be haunted by the sound of screeching metal and the silence that follows it. To the average news consumer, this is a feel-good story. It’s the kind of 'inspirational' garbage people share on social media to convince themselves that there is a cosmic safety net, ignoring the four bodies currently being processed by the local coroner. If this is a miracle, then the celestial management needs a serious audit. It’s like a pilot crashing a plane into a mountain, killing everyone but the guy in 14C, and expecting a standing ovation for his 'miraculous' landing skills.

The media, those parasites of the tragic, are currently feasting on the image of the girl walking barefoot on the tracks. It’s a hauntingly cinematic detail, isn't it? It’s the sort of aestheticized suffering that wins Pulitzers and sells life insurance. They focus on the 'walked away' part because the 'buried her entire family' part is a bit too heavy for the morning commute. We are a species that cannot look at the sun, so we stare at the tiny flicker of a match in a hurricane and call it the dawn. We demand a narrative where there is none. We need the survivor to be a symbol of 'resilience' because it absolves us of the terrifying reality that we live in a world where heavy machinery and human frailty are constantly at odds, and the machinery always wins.

And what of the aftermath? The girl is now being cared for by her grandparents—another layer of 'heartwarming' tragedy. We celebrate the 'strength' of the elderly taking in a broken child, ignoring the fact that their retirement has been transformed into a grief-stricken daycare center because our infrastructure, our safety standards, and our basic societal functioning are as decayed as the tracks the train was running on. The Left will use this to performatively mourn the lack of transit safety regulations while doing absolutely nothing to fund them, and the Right will offer 'thoughts and prayers' as if the creator of the universe is just waiting for enough hashtags to finally start caring about level crossings. Both sides will treat the child as a prop in their respective morality plays, while she deals with the reality that her entire world was erased in a single, mechanical instant.

Three stitches. That’s the price of a miracle these days. It’s a bargain, really, if you don’t count the total psychological annihilation that comes with it. We call it a miracle because the alternative is to admit that life is a series of random, often brutal collisions where the only thing that separates the 'blessed' from the 'departed' is a few inches of trajectory and a stroke of blind, uncaring luck. We cling to the 'miracle' label because it allows us to sleep at night, pretending that there’s a logic to the carnage. But I see the tracks for what they are: a straight line to nowhere, littered with the shoes of the lucky and the remains of the rest. If this is a miracle, I’d hate to see what a disaster looks like in the eyes of the hopeful.