Speech-YAy! I'm going first!

Simon! Simon! Shit! Damn! A man was freezing away on an overhang of ice that led into a three hundred foot crevasse. A hundred feet above him was an opening that allowed a feeble ray of light into the hellhole in which the man lay. Simon! Simon! The man’s voice reached no further than thirty feet above his head and as a terrible snowstorm raged outside, the man began to feel the hopelessness that had been steadily engulfing him for the past few hours. In desperation the man began to shout again. After many more hours the man’s voice finally gave out and he settled down on the cold ledge and waited for his death ¹.

The man’s name was Joe Simpson, a young British mountaineer. He and his friend, Simon Yates, had decided to make history by climbing the western face of the Siula Grande, a feat that had been attempted many times before though never successfully accomplished. The two young men were alpine style climbers which meant that they carried all of their food and clothing with them instead of relying on a fixed line of stocked camps. This also means that the climbers would be improvising while they were climbing instead of relying on fixed ropes that would have been previously set up by others. In this way the experience of Alpines style climbing becomes more exciting but also more dangerous.

Simpson and Yates made it to the top without any problems but soon after they began descending Simpson broke his leg. He landed from a 20 foot drop on an ice shelf and his tibia was thrust through his knee cap. For a climber that means that you’re pretty much finished. Any other man would have left Simpson to die but Simon instead came up with a tactic to lower both himself and Joe down to base camp. The going went well until, towards the middle of the night, Joe and the rope slipped off of a cliff. Simon felt the rope go taut and waited for Joe to signal. Joe was to put some weight on his uninjured foot to release some of the tension but after an hour there was still no change in the rope’s tension. Simon’s “seat” on the slope was starting to crumble and he knew that if he fell over the cliff as well, there was no hope for survival; so Simon made a desperate decision, not knowing how far from the ground Joe was. He cut the rope. Joe fell. The next day Simon discovered what had happened to Joe and he saw that under the cliff was a huge 30 foot wide crevasse. Simon assumed that his friend was dead and did not even bother to check the crevasse.

Is it right to just leave your friend to die in a situation where both of you are about to die even if it means that there is no future where both of you can survive? Are the values friendship and loyalty important enough to protect with your life? When faced with the ultimate challenge will you face it with a hard resolve or will you throw away your bonds of friendship and trust and flee?

Are the bonds of friendship and loyalty weaker than the desire to escape death? Can one overcome one’s survival instinct and face death in order to save a friend? Life is but a test with its right and wrong answers and when the time is called, the score is calculated to see who has lived the best life. But even if you get a 99%, one terrible choice can flunk you. One choice: like abandoning your friend in the face of danger. I believe that when one is faced with a desperate situation in which there seems to be no hope and it seems best to run away, that the person should stand firm and try his or her best to survive and move onward. The U. S. government thinks so too. With its sole survivor policy the U. S. government works very hard to get “sole survivors”, the term given to people whose family members had died in battle, out of the combat zone even at the cost of death. Saving Private Ryan, a certain film illustrates this concept. Captain John H. Miller was tasked with the retrieval of Private First Class James Francis Ryan from the battlefield. In order to retrieve Private Ryan Captain Miller and a team of seven had to brave the front lines of battle against overwhelming odds. The men could have retreated and left Private Ryan to die but instead their bonds of loyalty to their country and their brother in arms held strong. Only two men from the rescue group survived and were able to bring Private Ryan back to safety. A mother at home now had here only son back. Five men lost their lives to save one. This is the difference between the good fight and the bad.

Leaving your friend to die in any situation not only creates a moral dilemma, but it also leaves a permanent scar on your conscience. No matter how hard you may try to forget, it will always sneaks up in times when you least expect it. You will forever wonder if you deserve to live a happy life or if anyone could ever call you a friend again. So many things that you had taken for granted would no longer be within your reach. Is it really worth living a life of regret rather than dying in order to save your friend? Logically speaking, yes, if your friend is about to die, you should go ahead and save yourself. What would be the point of wasting your life anyway? Yes, we can be logical, but what price do we pay when we are ruled by our minds instead of our hearts?

Guilt is a heavy burden to bear. By choosing your life over your friend’s, does that make you a bad person? Indecision will eat away at your heart and what makes things worse is the ambiguity of your decision. You will never know if your friend could have survived with your help. Indecision will lead to guilt – your friend could be alive today if you had decided to stay and help instead of fleeing. Guilt will lead to depression and depression may lead to death. How many times have we heard of cases in which depressed people cannot overcome their emotional turmoil and thus commit suicide? How long will you spend in rehabilitation? How long will you spend getting your life back on track, and getting over your guilt? Five, ten years? By the time that you are mentally stable again, you will have to start life again from scratch. Is it really worth it? I don’t think it is, and you shouldn’t either. The most important things in life are priceless and when you give them up you can never have them back. So are you willing to go without friends for the rest of your life? Are you willing to throw away trust? When the time comes, I hope that everyone here will make the right choice. Thank you.

¹ In the critically acclaimed documentary “Touching the Void” Joe Simpson and Simon Yates test the bonds of friendship in the face of death.

Bibliography

Bissell, Ronald D. "Friendship." Authors Den 13 July 2002: 0-3. Print.

Harvey, Kay. "Depths of Depression." St. Paul Pioneer Press 14 Nov. 1999: 0-6. Print.

"Joe Simpson: My journey back into the void." Interview by Peter Stanford. The Telegraph 22 Oct. 2007: 0-1. Print.

Simpson, Joe. Touching the void. New York: HarperPerennial, 1998. Print.

Touching the Void. Dir. Kevin Macdonald. Perf. Brendan Mackey and Nicholas Aaron. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 2004. DVD.