logic that when George fires his shotgun at Martha and an
umbrella pops out, he laughed out loud. This, in a way, is what
that officer on the Dan Ryan Expressway did as well. In the
extreme excitement of the chase, he stopped reading Russ’s
mind. His vision and his thinking narrowed. He constructed a
rigid system that said that a young black man in a car running
from the police had to be a dangerous criminal, and all evidence
to the contrary that would ordinarily have been factored into
his thinking — the fact that Russ was just sitting in his car and
that he had never gone above seventy miles per hour — did not
register at all. Arousal leaves us mind-blind.
6. Running Out of White Space
Have you ever seen the videotape of the assassination attempt
on Ronald Reagan? It’s the afternoon of March 30, 1981.
Reagan has just given a speech at the Washington Hilton Hotel
and is walking out a side door toward his limousine. He waves
to the crowd. Voices cry out: “President Reagan! President
Reagan!” Then a young man named John Hinckley lunges
forward with a .22-caliber pistol in his hand and fires six bullets
at Reagan’s entourage at point-blank range before being