The computerization of automobiles has put DIY maintenance and repair of them beyond most of us. Will the same thing happen with home electrical repair? I don’t know. The marketing of automated "smart homes" plays on our supposed desires for convenience and energy efficiency. But even the intricacies of programming a single electronic thermostat or timer assume that we will have need to fuss with it often enough to remember how to. Is this convenient? And when we keep telling ourselves we are saving energy, are we actually aware of how little we are saving or how much energy it took to make these energy-saving devices? Whether we think we are saving money in the process or are just doing some kind of civic duty, who convinced us? And did they do so only from their civic duty or because it was their livelihood to do so?
Do business, government, and the media address people’s real fears or do they create fear? Do they provide reliable, efficient, and convenient technology and services for people or do they engineer and market things in such a way that people are made more dependent on these providers and their often unreliable, inefficient, and inconvenient products and services?
Hype comes in three forms: advertising, propaganda, and news. The agents of these three activities are typically business, government and the media. The word "hype" means exaggerating, overdoing. These agents do not create fears and desires out of nothing. They take natural tendencies in us and emphasize them, encourage them, and give them public legitimacy. They do not do this first for our sake, out of an objective judgment that it will be good for us to give attention to what they are portraying. They have ulterior motives of profiting, exercising power, and currying fame and favor. And we may let ourselves be carried away in their schemes in the name of our own similar motives or in the name of more noble-sounding ones, like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But when we let ourselves be taken down the path, are we making a good judgment of what is in our real interest or are we sacrificing something of greater value?
One of the values that can be handed over when we buy into the hype of modern life is courage. Courage is the virtue of having the heart to act in spite of fearful things. Fire is a fearful thing to encounter, and so the prospect of fire is also an anxiety. It is true that electricity is able to start a fire. But by now the safety industry has hyped this fact into a mistrust of any electrical work being done by nonprofessionals. Because of this, many otherwise confident do-it-yourselfers avoid electrical projects or feel uneasy for years after doing work on their wiring. Those who are not uneasy are considered foolhardy or perhaps a menace to the community.
I realize that I may be undermining my own job here. I am in the business of troubleshooting and repairing existing electrical circuits in homes. If people or their neighbors were to become more knowledgeable and self-reliant in this sort of thing, I would have to do something else. So would a farmer if everyone started growing their own. I am not advocating that we never depend on one another. I am wanting us to depend on ourselves and one another in a better and more accountable way, where if we disappoint someone they can take it personally and make us take their disappointment to heart and vice versa. As it is, we rarely know whom to be disappointed with and we may take it out on the first real person who finally takes our phone call. We often have to deal with a virtual conspiracy of people whose jobs are never to be sorry for anything or to change anything, but to avoid dissatisfied customers or at least to appease them at the least cost. This keeps their superiors from being disturbed, who have their own conspiracy of unaccountability.
I've noticed over time more and more road "improvements" we receive by virtue of being taxpayers. Just think, at one time we were lucky to have one stripe down the middle of a road, and the road could easily have unexpected potholes. A driver needed both hands on the non-power steering, had to keep alert, and couldn't afford to speed for fear of unknowns-of-the-road, which didn't include anything called a "speedtrap". But now what? Now roads have been made so visible and smooth and surrounded in many places by guardrails, that government road safety people (who justified budgets for all these ways to smooth traffic) have felt the need now to introduce even more (budgeted) artificial road enhancements to keep people awake and keep them from speeding. There are a variety of them and they go by various names. The one that made me laugh (only the first time I saw the sign) was "Traffic Calming Devices", which meant speedbumps. There are also median planters, intersection circles, and artificial curves, all of which must have jargon names I'm not aware of. Plus the overkill of warning signs to go with everything. So have taxpayers come full circle? What is the difference between a pothole and a speedbump? (I wish this were a riddle; can you come up with a punchline...). Are the guardrails perhaps bouncing DUI drivers back into me (killing both of us)? If a young buck is bent on speeding, is he more or less likely to run over a child on a curved residential street or a straight one?
This brings me to statistics. To be approved, all these improvements seem to need justification by statistics about how many lives they will save. Of course, when a year comes along in which no more lives were saved than the year before, anything can be blamed (increased cellphone use or makeup sales), and no one will be tearing the improvements out. But as long as fewer lives are lost every year, no project completed during those years can be questioned. Once deaths do bottom out, no doubt we will switch over from deaths to traffic injuries or anything else that can show safety "progress".
Am I against safety? I don't think so, because what I am for is responsibility, which is the safest safeguard of all. It doesn't depend on great expenditures and external props. And how can government promote such a difficult thing as responsibility? Not. Not its job. Not in the executive or legislative branches of government, at least. But in the courts, maybe. That is in fact perhaps where personal responsibility, which is a naturally occuring substance, began to be be eroded. When someone first tried to blame road kill on government, by means of lawsuits, judges without good judgement seem to have been unable to uphold any such thing as an individual's responsibility for his/her own safety. There are consequences involved in driving without vigilance. If a road crew should happen to leave a big boulder in the road, the degree to which an injury from hitting it is the crew's fault or the driver's fault is something a judge should work at determining and should not simply follow what has begun to be precedent. How can a judge be recognized as a good one if all judges are only following precedent. So corruption of judgement begins in a judge's own sense of personal responsibility. But back to the subject, a boulder in the road is an extreme, not to be compared to where we have arrived -- at potholes being outlawed and speedbumps mandated.
Then am I against saving lives? Will I draw a line that saves the lives of most responsible drivers but lets the negligent be maimed or die? Where do you draw the line you expect of people?
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Poetic attempts© 2006 Larry Dimock