Making the many pay for the mistakes, malice, or muttonheadedness of the few.
That is a ubiquitious part of current America which loads our everyday lives with inconvenience, impersonality, uncommonsense, and an insipid, barely-tangible hostility.
A few children get hurt on metal-bar playground equipment. Some in the normal line of playing, some because they were being idiots. So now we have bulbous plastic playgrounds with staticy slides and toned-down apparati. Every kid in America pays for the injury of a few. Every kid's playground is made a little tamer and blander to guard against the possibility of a few getting hurt.
A few callous fools deface the beautiful hot water pools in a national park. Now every one of the millions of visitors who see that pool each year are kept back 20 feet from its edge. Gone is the simplicity and direct experience of staring into the pool from right next to it. All are held back because of the crimes of a very few.
Email accounts are now a battle against spam, balancing the convenience of keeping a certain account with the ever-increasing amount of junk mail that arrives as time goes by. The spammers (who even ARE theses people????) deleteriously affect the email experience of every user, every day.
A final example is one I am very aware of: On a chair in my boss's office at the chemical plant sits a 8-inch tall stack of printed-out federal regulations. These are merely the applicable selections from the full pool of regs that is available online. Every chemical plant in the nation must follow these myriad rules, and failure to do so is unflinchingly treated as an intended crime, because of abuses of materials handled by plants in the past. Because of the inconsiderate and illadvised actions of plant personnel long in the past, the production of any chemical is saddled by a money-sucking, resource-leeching barrage of stringent regulations. Common sense can not be relied on, because the few people who decided not to use it have brought great penalties to the entire plant for which they worked. Tasks are dumbed-down to an infantile level and insultingly-basic checklists and procedures must be mutely followed, because one mistake has the chance of wreaking devastating havoc on the entire workforce. The chance may literally be a million to one (a sufficiently-large crystal of benzoyl peroxide somehow surviving in a drum of liquid, which could ignite, given the perfect combination of placement and a spark, creating a state-reportable process fire), but the weight of bureaucratic legal penalties that would fall from that eventuality make the "risk" not worth taking.
Our nation has reached a level of prosperity that allows us the luxury of preventing these small-percentage injuries, dangers and problems. But our trump-all concern for the mere possibility that someone could get hurt, or an accident happen again, robs our citizens of the responsibility of exercising their minds to protect themselves and consider their neighbors. We are raising a nation of blame-shifting, irresponsible, victimized, hyper-cautions dumb people, not forced to think for themselves, lest perhaps, oh dear god, they mess up!!
Not all these precautions are bad. Airbags are a very sensible way to cushion the unavoidable forward motion of humans in suddenly-stopped cars. It is indeed very bad when someone dies of asphyxiation from standing next to a nitogen-inerted tank. But what I think our nation is missing is the fact that you cannot prevent all eventualities, and the more you try to shut out, and the more improbable they are, the more freedom and responsibility you must necessarily strip from all people. There is risk to trusting people to take care of themselves, because not everyone will do it right, and sometimes they can hurt others too. But somehow there's a difference between loving our neighbors like the good Samaritan and trying to keep everybody from traveling that road to Jerusalem because there might be robbers there and they could get hurt. The philosophy of law and government seems to be legislating broad, over-compensating edicts to address and prevent specific issues and possibilities. This is not the personal care Christ commanded us to exercise. This is letting the laws do the work for us so we don't have to think or love or look at who's around us and get out of our comfort zone. Find out who's needy in your area and give from your paycheck to help them? Heck of a lot easier to just let the government take a percentage of your paycheck and dole it out nation-wide through welfare and healthcare. Trust parents to teach and care for their kids, and trust kids to learn from the knocks of life? Easier to just make plastic playgrounds so nobody can possibly get hurt.
Ultimately, life is not fair, life is not nice, and life gets people hurt, disadvantaged, and sometimes even killed. We're trying to stop that in America these days, but it can never work, and we're putting greater and greater burdens on everyone, and dumbing down our lives more and more. I fear for the future of this "soft" people, and in some ways I long for the closeness of reality that existed in older days and older cultures. Even if it means I break a leg, or am poor, or die at 30. That's life.
But I like my soft bed and salted roads and protective laws too. This is a hypothetical post, and it touches on something that I, at times, deeply long for, and get very frustrated with. I have to admit--it's easy to say all this from the comfort and safety of my middle-class suburban life. I can't say I'd think the same way if life started really knocking me, or the people I loved, around. Who knows.
This life, this country, this class, and this prosperity, is where God has placed me in His sovereign wisdom at this time. I don't want to disparrage these things and beat myself up, or others. I just want to think, and express what tugs at my heart sometimes.
--Clear Ambassador
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2 comments:
Hey dude, just wanted to say I enjoy reading your blurbs when I get the chance...Interesting thoughts and often insightful at that. Thought I might leave a comment or two.
If your point is that human care for one another should not be replaced by legislation, and I believe it is, then I would agree. And if you are stating that the rules that force us to make provision and accomodations for others do not exempt us from having a genuine concern for them, again, I most definitely agree. However, I can't help but feel that legislation safeguarding the well-being of others is worthwhile. There are serious ramifications associated with the removal of 'rules' that force companies and people to 'be nice to/care for' each other.
Not to imply that you are in favor of such a removal or that your post suggests that these rules be revoked. I mos' def' wasn't gettin' that vibe... As you noted, we live in a society where the average individual does not care much for those outside of their immediate circle of friends and family. We do not feel any personal weight of responsibility for our neighbors. As humans with sinful hearts, it would be unreasonable to expect anything else from our society. In the absence of care, legislation protects people and groups from harming other people or groups. So good with the bad, I think that legislation is crucial. (That's the point of the government, right? Theoretically, its supposed to make sure we all play nice and get along.) Still, I agree: we seem to have gone a bit overboard on rules while skimping out on care. In a self-based paradigm, caring is awkward and impractical.
We are more introverted and anti-social than ever. Just recently my dad and I were discussing the fact that IPODs and portable technology allow us to 'bring our own environment' with us and shut out the people around us. (Earbuds on a public transit system are a clear sign that their owners do not want to engage in a conversation.) Elevator rides among strangers are silent. We are a society that knows how to mind our own business. But that's another rant.
I think the safety and welfare of others is important, and if anything should be included in legislation, safety regulations should. I happen to know a thing or two about injuries ;P and my perspective as a bioengineer places a great deal of weight on protecting the health of others.
Even though many rules are inconvenient or even stupid, I don't think its fair to say, 'life is tough, get over it.' That may allow for the application of commonsense, but it lacks care for others. A calculating attitude that determines 'acceptable risk' may greatly increase efficiency, but it misses the heart. We need a balance between the realistic demands of a hard life and care for one another. Which is, I believe, exactly what you would propose. For whatever reason, I felt compelled to write it out explicitly.
Though one might argue that commonsense would lead us to care for one another, I think that both qualities are vital. It seems that we might improve in both in America. I am certain that I could...
oh and dude, I'm all about the plastic playstuff. as a kid growing up i actually preferred plastic slides to metal ones. plastic is a better medium for kids play toys and equipment than metal...that's just commonsense. ;P
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