Giving Your Right Arm For Freedom

A nice (if grisly) counterpart to those earlier NYTimes story is the capper to this one:

Body Parts From Jet Hit a Long Island Home

A man's leg and part of his spine came crashing onto the roof of a woman's home in Nassau County near Kennedy International Airport yesterday morning, and a short while later the man himself was found dead in the wheel well of a South African Airways jetliner that had just landed.

The woman's initial reaction was probably a lot calmer than mine would have been:

"I thought it was a really sick joke," said Ms. Hearne, a special education teacher. But when she realized that human remains were in her yard, she called the police. The impact made a hole the size of a watermelon in her garage roof, she said, but no one was hurt.

But what really impressed me was her reaction. To be honest, I expected to hear moaning about the damage to her house, or (totally understandable) squeamishness about what she found, but instead she said,

"I'm very grateful to be from this country," she said, "and to have never experienced the desire to flee my homeland."

Wow.