> it scares me when on a daily basis I see people trying to 'make safe'.
> Our risk filled world is becoming more so, in part as the unintended
> consequences of our attempts to reduce risk [car accidents involving
> 'safer' vehicles driven therefore at higher speeds, is one example]
It seems to me that the ways in which people try to make the world safe
are also very much ways in which they attempt to avoid personal
responsibility.
Make the web safe, give me products which block dangerous material, then I
will not have to pay attention to what my child does on the internet.
Make medicine safe, hold doctors responsible for anything that may go
wrong, then I will not have to be healthy.
Make my neighborhood safe, get rid of the criminals, then I will not have
to worry about where these criminals are coming from, or why they turn to
crime.
The safety we seem to desire gives us the opportunity to be lazy,
unwatchful, thoughtless. Someone else is to blame, and we should have
been protected. We can blame everyone but ourselves can't we. People
seem to be unaware that making something safe and 'fixing' it are not the
same thing. Arresting drug users will not get rid of drugs, and getting
rid of video games will not erase the pain and rage of young boys. Not
long ago someone mentioned the film Mindwalk, which touches on the issue
of how ineffective these bandaid fixes are.
We are sticking our finger in a dam that has already broken, and the river
rushes past us. We see only the little trickle spraying us in the face,
not the deluge that rushes around our ankles. It's true we cannot make
the world safe, because it is not, it never has been. If the world was
safe, would we not stagnate? Wouldn't the lack of necessity be the death
of invention? I think I have seen to much of the complacency of man to
believe that we would create and learn for the sake of knowledge and
invention. The percentage of the population that thinks that way is too
small to keep the entire world moving alone. We already stagnate to much
as a result of all our safety, I think we can ill afford more protection.
Liz
--"Liz Cantrell" <liz@fielden.org>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>