There was something that I wanted to write about. Oh, right. About the man who drowned at Wascana Lake about a week ago.

News items come and go. People die. Sometimes it's a homeless Aboriginal man's friend, sometimes it's Jack Layton. Kids get stolen, hurricanes come, planes crash into sides of important buildings. Things happen.

When 9-11 occurred, I remember not getting it. I was at home when it happened. My mom, horrified, standing in front of the 27" TV, and me, trying to comprehend what was happening. I was only thirteen, but I was thirteen. "Do you understand that this is real? People are dying in that building," mom said to me. I didn't understand. Ten years later, watching home-videos compiled by CBC, listening to screams and watching a cloud of black smoke and debris envelope stretches of pavement and people, I felt ashamed of my younger self. Too tucked in to issues of me to connect to my own race, dying.

I couldn't believe that a second man had drowned in Wascana Lake this summer -- the lake that I walk around with friends when it's a nice day out, and I'm bored, and we feel like exercise is a good idea. Maybe with Booster Juice, or running shoes.

I read an interview of the lady who dialed 9-11 for the drowning man's friend. When she asked him how long it had been, he answered thirty minutes. When she asked why it took so long for him to dial, he cried, saying that he had asked person after person, and they didn't believe him. Because who would believe a homeless man running around telling people that his friend was drowning? Who would want to lend somebody their cellphone when it might not get returned?

I also read that someone -- a "witness" -- saw the swimming man go under. So someone saw a man begin to drown, and didn't go after him.

I can relate to not caring about people the way I should. Not stopping for hitch-hikers. I didn't stop when I saw someone in the ditch on a cold night mid-January last year. Did they have a cellphone? Were they okay? I don't know. I worried about it, felt bad about it, but it was dark out. I was alone.

It's not my responsibility.

One of the four men who made it out of one of the Trade Tower buildings above where the plane hit told reporters he was no hero. He went down instead of up, and he didn't get his co-workers to show them they could get through. "I did it for my family," he said, but guilt was all over his posture and eyebrows and the way he didn't look at the camera when he said it.

They searched for the man's body in the lake for two days before they found it. I was at a gathering, and people started talking about it.

Who would want to swim in that lake?

Obviously he wasn't a good swimmer.

Jokes were made. I understand that this man wasn't "important" to anyone in the room. That deaths happen daily. That we're numbed to little incidences like this. Sometimes to bigger issues: like Libya, or oil in the ocean, or Japan having the ocean take a bite out of the side of the continent. It's easy to forget when you live comfortably. And really, it's not our responsibility. People are hired to deal with these issues. People to fight wars, fires, to pull bodies from underneath rubble. Anyone who isn't hired and does it is a hero. A real hero.

Because no one would lend a man their cellphone.

Because no one would jump into a lake.

Because no one would stop.

Because it's not our responsibility.