Considering the fine
art of fleeing

So people should give Jennifer Wilbanks, the so-called "Runaway Bride," a break. When she fled her impending wedding, she engaged in a fundamental survival impulse that is hard-wired into most species. At least, most living species. Those animals that didn't perfect the fine art of "getting out of Dodge" are no longer on the planet. Nature is unkind to the curious, the casual, the slow and the procrastinator. It turns them into food.

Jennifer Wilbanks will be forced to pay for all the cops, firefighters and volunteers she left behind looking for her when she fled Atlanta like her butt was on fire. That's the way it should be. The act of fleeing necessarily involves ignoring its long-term effects (i.e., embarrassment, lawsuits, forgetting where you live) in favor of the short-term effects (i.e., survival, living to flee another day).

That's why most animals were given "twitch" muscles, those muscles that can help you go from zero to outta sight in two seconds. Very few animals survive because of their ability to casually jog 26 miles.

But fleeing has its consequences. The Runaway Bride is finding that out. In the wild, many a hyena had to return red-faced to the pack of "laughing hyenas" after suddenly bolting on hearing a branch snap in the bushes. ("Yeah, I knew it wasn't a lion all the time, hah, hah. Just practicing.")

Fleeing is unfairly equated with cowardice today. But there is a difference. Cowards slink away at any sign of danger, leaving others to do the fighting. Strategical fleeing is a natural impulse. I admit, the line is kind of hazy at times.

"Retreating Joe Johnston," a Confederate general, never found a Civil War battle he couldn't avoid. But he stuck out the war. Confederate soldier and future famous writer Mark Twain, however, admits that he "lit out for the territories" when the going got tough. Twain eventually fled all the way to Hawaii before noticing that the war was over.

Fleeing is such a part of our evolutionary development that it has been incorporated into laws. Many states make it mandatory that you first attempt to flee in the face of danger before defending yourself.

Florida is going against that time-tested strategy of retreat first, press charges later. Legislators there passed a bill that grants immunity to Floridians who shoot intruders in their homes. A similar bill says that even in public places, Floridians would not have a legal duty to retreat before using deadly force against assailants.

This is an interesting evolutionary development. It puts the fleeing gene on the other foot. In the future in Florida, robbers who do not flee from armed citizens will become extinct.

Hawaii should pass such a law. Mainly because -- although fleeing is, if not honorable, at least an effective method of coping with sudden danger -- on a small island, there's just not much room to flee.