Michael Moore called Scott Prouty a hero who deserves a medal, for exposing the nasty underbelly of Mitt Romney. Prouty’s response was that heroes go into burning buildings. He didn’t see himself as a hero, just a person who released a video that needed to be released. But it turns out he is a hero.
Some time before, he heard a crash one day and went running towards the scene of the accident. A car was slowly sinking into a canal. A couple of guys had tried to save her – one had broken his hand punching out the passenger window – but they couldn’t get her out of the safety belt and the car was sinking fast. They gave up on her, thought she was dead.
But Prouty, running towards the scene, called his friend and said “bring a knife”. His friend did and Prouty dove in and managed to unlock the door. He had to surface and go down again a number of times. He said it was dark and murky, being swamp water, but he managed to cut the woman free from the seat belt and bring her up. Her body was limp but he remembers kind of smiling and knowing somehow that it was going to be okay, she was going to live.
And she did. And if you think that’s heroic, consider this: the cops arrived but they didn’t go in because the area adjoins the Everglades and the canal the woman had driven into leads into its swamps, so the chances of meeting an alligator were high. Scott Prouty knew that but he saved her anyway.
Sometime later, after he’d recorded Mitt Romney talking about the 47% of allegedly worthless Americans, when Prouty was about to release the video, a friend said it was either incredibly stupid of him or incredibly brave. “Last time I did something incredibly stupid or incredibly brave it was the proudest moment of my life,” said Prouty. Now he’s got two moments in his life that he can be proud of.
