Falling Short

MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN

These words appeared on Belshazzar’s wall, written by the hand of God to serve notice that Belshazzar’s administration had reached its conclusion, a sort of Holy Referendum, a cosmic Game Over.  Its meaning was clear.

The clock was ticking, and now your time is up. You have been weighed and measured, and found wanting.  Your kingdom is to be divided between the Medes and the Persians.  Certainly, no king would stand for that, but the implication of the absence of the king was clear, and that night Balshazzar was in fact killed as Darius took command.

So by now, you’re probably expecting a diatribe on the Bush administration, some rant about how the Republicans have let us all down, drawing a parallel to the Biblical story.  Not so.  In fact, I bring it up to illustrate the vital and sometimes painful need to set standards and make a clear assessment based upon them.

I submit that if the standard is allowing individuals to live their lives with a semblance of safety and self-determinacy, current approaches on every level are inadequate.  We can strip away all notions of political affectation, and simply observe that today’s methods start with gentle, declawed and debarked parents whose sole association with their children is to preserve their physical safety, and ends with an exploding prison population, an impressive array of neurotic behaviors, schools that are expected to fulfill the entire education and upbringing of a child, and a blossoming relationship with drugs.

These can be summed up by noting a torrid love affair with the notion of safety.  If something’s not safe, we want no truck with it.  In a typical day in America, you will be hard pressed to not see a fleet of warning labels plastered to everything you touch.

But in fact, the labels are the symptom, not the disease.  The warning labels are an outgrowth of a flurry of lawsuits, like little memorial markers reminding us of every time someone cut their finger or stubbed their toe or tripped and fell in such a way that it cost a corporation thousands or even millions of dollars.

By now, nearly everyone knows the story of the label on coffee cups.  Someone was silly enough to win a lifetime of financial wealth and a bit of infamy based solely upon the fact that coffee is hot.  What happens when you try something new with no warning labels, and no prior knowledge of your own?  You show an appropriate level of caution, or suffer the consequences.  Venomous animals come with no warning label, and those not showing respect pay the price.  Those who are familiar with snakes may use them as props, for medicine, or pets.  But only with experience and understanding.

Someone who has experienced coffee understands that it is hot.

We will, as a society, pay the ultimate price for our wanton disregard for the sanctity of the warning label.  By plastering warning labels on everything from shampoo to CD players, we run the risk of “alert fatigue”, a state in which warnings of actual danger go unheeded because they are camouflaged to match the myriad warnings around them.

One of the solid wooden doors at work began being shut by default one day, creating a situation in which people could injure one another by simply showing up at the same time.  I created a caution sign in hopes of reducing the chance that someone on the other side of the door would smash my face.  It was on brightly-colored neon yellow paper, the seizure-inducing yellow of a highlighter made in a third-world country, designed to give you eye cancer from prolonged exposure, replete with bold black stripes designed to prod the portion of the brain responsible for recognizing bees and snakes at a distance.

My boss was so proud of the sign and its effectiveness that she immediately requested thirty copies of the same sign with the words adjusted to alert everyone in the office of a financial deadline.  Now my door sign is a zebra in the middle of the herd, stripes and all, just another financial deadline warning.  By filtering out the onslaught of warnings, we’re back to a state in which someone might go to work in the morning, but come home that evening from a hospital with stitches.

I can vividly remember the point in my childhood, around 12 or so, when I was hooking up a propane tank to our outdoor grill, and was told by my common sense that I was finally handling something that had the ability to rise up and end my life.  In my hands was an object with a truly meaningful warning label.

By contrast, my vehicle, which is a member of a family responsible for more deaths nearly any other cause on Earth, is designed to make me feel safe and cozy.  There should be a giant yellow sticker on it that says “THIS CAR WILL END YOUR LIFE.”  My cup of coffee should have a fluffy sock around it.  If it must have a message, it should be in cursive, and say “This cup of coffee, properly made, should be soothingly hot and steamy.”  As a joke, perhaps, a warning could say “don’t drop hot coffee in your lap dumbass”.  Or “Drive with it in your hand and take your chances with your nuts, genius.”

I’m looking down at my keyboard because I spilled coffee on it yesterday.  My keyboard has a warning label.  Who looks at their keyboard!?  Certainly not those who type enough to cause damage to their hands.  If it’s really that big a deal, it would be just as simple to install a chip that shuts it off for five minutes out of every hour.  There would still be a black market for “unlocked” keyboards that run full-time, and you could be a real badass and get one to type to your heart’s content, carefree, reckless, and in wild disregard for the hazards of repetitive stress injuries.

You could drive with your coffee between your legs and no hands on the wheel.  On a motorcycle.  With slits cut in your leather leggings to allow the burning coffee to scald your legs if you fail.  Maybe one in every 500,000 coffee cups could be rigged with a mild explosive, just to make it more exciting.  Maybe you’d be less prone to drive around with it in your lap.  It’d certainly make the warnings worthwhile.

“Warning, this coffee cup may explode without notice.”

Family Law

As a resident and citizen of one of the more progressive blue states, Washington, I would like to highlight the harm caused by so-called child “protective” service agencies, most notably those operated by government officials.

As a single father of a 5-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son, I’m faced daily with the precarious balancing act of inducing precision discomfort to give them pause before they do something truly harmful to themselves or another, be it throwing something now, or allowing disrespect to run them afoul of the law later.

Almost a year ago, a childcare provider tried to use a children’s protective agency to extort money from me, and the result was a paralysis of fear that I’d lose my children to the legal system.

Immediately I began to consider contingency plans should the situation escalate further.  Would I show more loyalty to a broken legal system acting on a false complaint, abide by the letter of a blind law and have faith that they’d see through the false allegations?  Or should I hedge my bets, relocate, anonymize, and eschew personal wealth and well-being in favor of raising my children with my watchful eye on their future and training for adulthood?

It was a quick and simple choice.  When I asked the gentleman who came to my door to interrogate me and inspect my home sans warrant, cause, or information, I asked whether he had, in fact, found any evidence to substantiate the claims against me, he skirted the question brilliantly.  I am a debt collector, and by way of professional habit will verbally nail down a story piece by piece, and he was no exception.  Try as he might to avoid giving a direct answer (courtesy of government transparency) he finally admitted that no evidence could be found.  It was another hour of counter-interrogation before he finally owned up to the allegations: excessive belt-spanking, which made a consistent lack of evidence seem all the sillier.  In the absence of marks or bruises, he’d imposed upon my faith in the legal system to invite himself into my home, sniffing for anything fishy.

I got a statement of my rights, buried on page 14 of a packet sent two weeks after the visit and not referenced in the index.

I got a copy of a vaguely-worded statute six months later after a repeated round of phone calls with the gentleman detailing what I may and may not do as a parent.

As a man, I understand something that is invisible to women: guilty until proven guilty.  Even when I’m completely exhonerated, I’m still “that guy who was accused of”.  You’re made to understand that when a child protective agency comes to your door as well.  If you’re cleared in the course of this investigation, you’d better not tangle with whomever you had problems before (and that requires complete guesswork, because complaints are all confidential), lest you find yourself with the uphill battle of being cleared a second time.  It’s as though the boy cried wolf the third time, and the townspeople came out and shot all the sheep just to be sure.

After that first visit, I’d come to understand the impossibility of accomplishing anything meaningful with the legal system, that it is in fact broken, and that placing faith in its ability to find the truth would lose my children to an industrial factory-style family.  I am the protectorate of my own children in a legal system where there is no empirical test for intoxication or requirement of malice, but merely vague notions of enforcing a dream of a stress-free existence for minors.

My children will be exposed to stress.  They will be forced to do things they don’t like, be it cleaning their bedrooms or learning to tie their shoes.  They will accomplish things under duress, such as scrubbing their artwork off the apartment walls, or being abruptly and brutally yanked from the path of an oncoming car.  Poor discipline and a lack of respect are as much of an oncoming car as the physical reality of one.  A life of incarceration is as terrible an meaningless a death as an auto accident, if not more drawn out and guaranteed to cause collateral damage.  A life of inability to articulate ones goals within the framework of established laws and norms is as meaningless an end as a coma.  And my negligence as a parent would be as great for allowing them to careen into an oncoming society as standing idly by whilst they chase a ball into traffic.

In the presence of loving, caring parents, fleeing from “justice” is not a surprise, it is guaranteed.

Devil’s Advocate

I’m sure I’m in the minority here, but please allow me to point out a rather non-cosmopolitan statistical fact.

Analyzing traffic patterns in terms of foot-minutes elucidates the principle that round-the-clock speeding helps to reduce traffic jams.  Go look up “elucidate” and “cosmopolitan” before you post your bitter ignorant reply.

An arbitrary section of road will have a certain number of foot-minutes available around the clock, and a given vehicle traveling at a certain speed, say 30mph will require a certain number of foot-minutes to traverse said portion of road.  A vehicle traveling twice the speed will require half as many foot-minutes, and all wear and fuel considerations aside, demands less of the road’s capacity upon which it travels.

An overload of demand for a limited amount of road capacity results in a traffic jam, and a queuing process.  Ergo, driving more quickly reduces demand overall, spreads out demand toward the edges of the peak period, shortens the queue, and alleviates a traffic jam more quickly.

For example, a 10000ft stretch of highway will, over the course of a day, have a total capacity of 14,400,000 foot-minutes.  A 20 foot car, traveling at 50 feet per second would traverse the distance in 200 seconds, and require 4000 foot-seconds, or about 67 foot-minutes of road capacity.  A car traveling at 100 feet per second would traverse the distance in 100 seconds, requiring only 33 foot-minutes.  During the period between 4 and 6pm, 1,200,000 foot-minutes are available, which would accommodate 36,000 of the faster cars, but would jam up if traveled by 30,000 of the slower cars.  But more importantly, of the 30,000 vehicles, many of them would no longer even be on that stretch of highway when the traffic jam begins, were they to travel more quickly.  If enough cars get out the way soon enough, then the number of cars at peak demand may even drop below the threshold for a traffic jam altogether.  And bear in mind, a car traveling at 1 foot per second in a jam requires over 3300 foot minutes, dropping the roads capacity to a mere 360 cars during the same 2-hour period.

Driving slowly saves money and fuel.  It even saves lives.  But driving fast saves TIME.  Do your part to save civilization, and put the hammer down.