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*Image courtesy of Asia Times
On the evening of 28th September 2018, a 7.5-magnitude earthquake hit the coast of Sulawesi, Indonesia. Through the disasters of the earthquake and the subsequent tsunami that followed, nearly 1350 people were killed and several more faced serious injuries.
We all hear about these kinds of things in the news - Hurricane Whats-Its-Name rumbling through the Americas, another earthquake hitting some remote island somewhere. But what a lot of us (myself included) rarely stop to do is think about these big tragedies on a smaller scale.
For the rest of the world, when these disasters hit we get faced with a number - the number of deaths, the number of those affected, number of survivors. As we swipe out of a news feed and go on with our busy lives, those numbers never seem to manifest into anything else, let alone the individuals that they represent.
Mr Anthonius Gunawan Agung was traffic control officer at the Mutiara SIS Al-Jufrie airport in Sulawesi on the evening of the earthquake. After his colleagues in the control tower fled as the tsunami waves got closer, Anthonius stayed behind to make sure that the singular plane left on the runway would be able to take off properly and fly away to safety, saving the lives of all the passengers and crew on board. Subsequently, Anthonius was not able to escape in time and died from injuries whilst trying to escape the impending tsunami wave.
He was faced with the impossible decision - to save your own life or save a hundred other strangers’. When I first read about this, the first thing I thought was how similar it was to those ‘no-right-answer’ scenarios you get given in Philosophy to make you think about ethics, most famously things like the trolley scenario where you have to decide whether to push someone in front of an out-of-control trolley to save the school children in the trolley’s line causing the person’s immediate death or let fate have its way and cause the death of the school children instead. What I personally found so compelling about this story was how easily Anthonius made that decision. In the situation he was in, he didn’t exactly have time to ponder over which one would be the most ethical or make the most sense - merely, he would have had to just follow his gut because of the lack of time he had.
How do we as human beings make that decision? To answer this question, you can look at it in two ways.
Human beings are programmed for survival, whether that be the survival of ourselves or the survival of the human race as a whole. By taking his own life, Anthonius was ignoring his natural instincts of self-preservation, however, because of the nature of the choice he had in front of him, his death meant the survival of many more people, therefore in some twisted way bettering ‘human survival’ as more people would then be able to aid the survival of the human race in the future.
Another way you could look at it would be to evaluate how humans feel empathy. When Anthonius made this life-altering decision, he knew that it would lead to his death. However, he was able to look at the bigger picture. In front of him stood a plane, a plane filled with adults, children, elderly, families, married people, divorced people, single people, widows, all with their own individual lives and individual stories. It is not a human instinct to harm. Naturally, humans do not harm without reason. So, was that what stopped Anthonius from running away? Knowing that that act would mean the harm of all those other people in the plane waiting to take off?
Whatever the answer to these questions, I know one thing - Mr Anthonius Gunawan Agung was a hero. The kind of self-sacrifice that allows you to give up everything for the livelihood of others is an act so selfless that one cannot even begin to imagine how strong and good a person Anthonius was. At 21, he gave up his right to a future for the future of everyone on that plane that tragic September evening. His intentions were heroic, but yet we cannot ignore the impact it has had both positively and negatively. All 147 passengers and crew survived the earthquake, Anthonius Gunawan Agung died and his death will be felt by everyone close to him for the rest of their lives.
I didn’t know Anthonius Gunawan Agung, but I dedicate this article to his memory and offer my condolences to everyone affected by his death and the hundreds of others devastatingly killed by this disaster.
In memory of Anthonius, I will end with his last words: "Batik 6321 clear for take off".