Tag Archives: people

In traffic

people,

Yesterday while I was waiting for my bus to go to work, I watched a woman dressed oddly step off the curb across the street. The street in question is a six-lane major arterial that is nicknamed, among regional transportation professionals, “the little freeway.” It isn’t an actual highway, but it is very busy, and drivers routinely zoom along over the speed limit.

She stepped off right in front of a car. My heart jumped a beat. The driver swerved and missed her (luckily the next lane had an opening for him to swerve into). The driver tapped his horn. Just a quick tap, not a long, angry lean on the button thing. The woman flipped off the car and started shouting.

She did not retreat to the curb. She ambled further, crossing lanes, as cars stopped for the crazy person. She kept yelling angrily, occassionally flipping the bird in random directions as she craned her neck and tried to look over all the cars now stopped for her, as if she were trying to see if a bus was coming (there’s a big bus stop going the other way right across from the one I catch my work bus to).

Still yelling angrily, she ambled back to the curb and started walking toward the corner.

Traffic began moving again.

She got to the corner, and without waiting for the light or even looking, she stepped off in the crosswalk. Again, miraculalously, cars stopped. She crossed, getting honked at only one more time. Once she reached our side, she was still angrily yelling, apparently at some invisible person right in front of her.

I had a brief moment of worry that the crazy lady was going to try to get on our bus (which was one of the vehicles that had had to stop to let her cross). She didn’t; she stalked right through the crowd waiting for the bus, yelling all the way, without meeting anyone’s eyes.

Later, during lunch, I was reading my usual news sites. At about the same time this lady was playing chicken with traffic, in another part of town, a man was seen sitting in the middle of a road. His legs were crossed, elbows on hos knees, and his face buried in his hands as if he were crying. A couple pedestrian passers-by called to him to get out of the road. One stepped off the curb and approached him.

A car came careening down the road. The bypasser who had stepped off the curb jumped back. The car did not stop. It struck the man, killing him, and kept going as if nothing had happened. Police apprehended him a short distance away. The 23-year-old has been booked into jail for driving under the influence and vehicular homicide.

Reading that made my heart skip a beat again, and I marvelled, briefly, that the woman I watched had avoided a similar fate.

In the evening, shortly after I got home, my husband came into the house and told me about his day. The second thing he told me was that he had been run over on his way into work. He rides his bike to and from work. He said he was riding along in the bike lane, when a woman chatting on her cell phone suddenly turned right.

“I was banging on the front of the car after she stopped, trying to get her to back up, because my leg was pinned under my bike, which was pinned under her car.”

He insisted he was uninjured, and I couldn’t prove otherwise. Amazingly, all he had to do for the bike was replace his front tire. There’s a bicycle repair shop right next to his place of work.

He rode the bike home from work.

Three times, yesterday, traffic incidents made my heart skip a beat.

Of the stories, the one that still amazes me most is the crazy lady who was never struck. Not because she did anything to protect herself. It was entirely because a large number of drivers were alert enough to see her and stop.

The saddest is the guy killed by the drunk driver. Why was he sitting in the rode? Was he mentally ill or severely impaired and just didn’t realize where he was? Was there some sort of medical issue playing out? Was he hoping to get killed? We’ll never know.

The one that most frightens me, of course, is my husband’s accident. Unlike the others, he was right where he was supposed to be: obeying the laws, wearing his helmet, flashing lights on his bicycle, the whole thing. He came only inches from injury or far worse because a driver was paying more attention to something other than her driving.

I don’t tell him I love him often enough.

Not an excuse

people,

During the last 27 years I have shaved off my beard exactly twice. Both times it was for a Halloween costume. The first time, a friend who was attending one of the parties we went to had just completed medical school the year before and was in his internship. I had noticed him looking at me oddly. The first time I attributed it to this being the first time he’d seen me without a beard.

Eventually he asked, “So, how did you get your lip tore so badly it required stitches?”

I had forgotten about the scar. I didn’t think it was that noticeable even when there wasn’t facial hair to hide it.

So I told him the story of one of my dad’s worse drunken Sunday afternoons when I was 10 years old, and how he’d come to beat me badly enough to break my collar bone, split my lip, and so on. This led other people who had starting listening in to ask some questions, so I wound up talking way more about Dad’s abusive behavior than I like. The sum up is: I, my sister, and our half siblings each has our own small collection of physical scars thanks to dad’s beatings.

One of the people listening observed, “Wow! You seem so much more together than I would expect.”

I made some kind of self-deprecating comment, such as, “Oh, I’m far less sane than you realize” or something, and tried to change the subject.

One of the others started telling a story of an ex who had had a similarly abusive childhood, and how incredibly messed up he was after. A couple others chimed in with similar tales. And then one person said he had known a few people like that, who blamed every time they screwed up—particularly when they hurt people close to them—on that abusive childhood.

“It’s just an excuse to be as thoughtless and irresponsible as they’d like,” he said. And then looked at me as if the fact that I at least try to think and be responsible proves his statement.

Which I wasn’t completely comfortable with. I agree that a dysfunctional childhood isn’t an excuse for such behavior, but life is very seldom as simple as that.

My paternal grandmother doesn’t believe in mental illness. She would insist that it’s all just excuses or someone wanting attention. Never mind that for some mental illness we can point to specific physical problems in the brain, or a lack of ability to produce or regulate a particular neurochemical, she always believed that if the mentally ill person wanted to be well, they would be. This was particularly troublesome when one of my sisters began having epileptic seizures, and grandma announced that as far as she was concerned, epilepsy was in the same category as mental illness, and it wasn’t a real problem at all.

So, while I agree that a bad childhood doesn’t excuse any and all bad or troublesome behaviors a person may exhibit in adulthood, it’s no less arrogant and cruel to dismiss those experiences as totally irrelevant than my grandmother’s thoughts on epilepsy.

It is a gross oversimplification to say that people like me have “gotten over it” and everyone else is just using it as an excuse. More accurate to say that some coping strategies are more socially acceptable and less disruptive than others.

While I do think that I’ve done a fairly good job of moving past that unfortunate history, I can’t honestly take all the credit. Some of it is just luck. I inherited a certain amount of arrogance and bullheadedness from that same abusive father, reinforced by an extra dose of stubborn refusal to give up from the grandmother on Mom’s side of the family. When my parents finally divorced and we moved more than 1000 miles from Dad, I was lucky enough to find a group of sci fi geeks and music nerds my own age. That gave me a new sense of family and belonging I hadn’t had before. I’ve built a career out of a knack for language, a predilection for troubleshooting, a level of curiosity some might describe as unhealthy, and a compulsion for explaining things to anyone I can corner.

A lot of my “talents” would be exceedingly annoying characteristics in a different context.

Which isn’t to say that we are obligated to put up with behavior from someone who doesn’t seem to want to change. We all have our limits. Sometimes we have to make that cold calculation: is having this person in my life worth the effort and trouble they put me through? If the answer is “no,” then we find a way to gracefully bow out of their life. No need to make a dramatic statement, or try to convince everyone else to drop the friend. Drastic measures are only required if someone’s health or safety is in danger, or if the other person willfully pursues you and tries to drag you back into their crazy.

Because troubling or annoying behavior isn’t an excuse for you to be a jerk.

Surplus Population

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In A Christmas Carol, when Scrooge is trying to get rid of the men soliciting charity donations, he declares, “If they would rather die, they had better do it and decrease the surplus population!” Later, the Ghost of Christmas Present hurls that line back at Scrooge, when Scrooge is worrying about Tiny Tim’s health. The notion of people’s lives being a surplus to be disposed of sounds harsh to us, but it was an accepted notion to many people at the time.

Long before Dickens wrote that line, in fact, before Dickens himself was born, the British Parliament passed the Chimney Sweepers Act 1788, which, among other things, forbid Chimney Sweeps from “hiring” apprentices less than eight years of age. Climbing boy (sometimes girls) where small children essentially sold by families too poor to feed all their kids to Chimney Sweeps. They climbed up through the elaborate and dirty ducts of industrial chimneys to clear and clean them. It was a hard and dangerous life. Most died before puberty. Virtually all that live past puberty died in their late teens from “a most noisome, painful and fatal disease” called Soot Wart, which was eventually identified as Chimney Sweep’s Cancer, the first identified industrial-caused cancer.

But a lot of them didn’t live long enough to succumb to the cancer, since the soot they literally lived in (one master chimney sweep once famously disparaged another because he actually allowed his climbing boys more than two baths a year) contains all sorts of nasty substances, including arsenic. Others got trapped in chimneys where if they were lucky they would die of asphyxiation before they were literally cooked to death.

Then there was the habit some bosses had of setting a fire once the boy was up to make sure he moved fast (if he didn’t work fast enough, he died from smoke inhalation).

Being a climbing boy wasn’t truly an apprenticeship. The only skill one learned was climbing chimneys, and that didn’t lead to better employment. They were never paid wages. And their room and board included a nightly routine of standing close to a fire and while having elbows and knees scrubbed with brine on a stiff brush (which toughened the skin into something that resembled an insect’s carapace). In Scotland Chimney Sweeps didn’t use climbing boys at all, but rather pulled sets of rags and specially designed brushes up through the chimneys one ropes. In 1803 a man named George Smarts invented a mechanical sweeping machine, but virtually no one in the U.S. or U.K. used it.

But the climbing boys system was cheaper. The 1788 act was never really enforced, neither were subsequent acts (1834, 1840) that set the age higher and called for various health and safety measures. One reason they weren’t enforced is because the enforcement mechanisms proposed in each bill were always amended out in order to get enough votes to pass. A very few Master Chimney Sweeps switched to the mechanical brush system. From time a politician or other somewhat prominent person would take up the cause, but sending boys up the chimneys was cheaper and mostly worked. The price of the suffering and death wasn’t factored in because, well, there were always more boys.

It wasn’t until 1875 when a Coroner’s Inquest first ruled the death of a boy in a chimney as manslaughter (rather than “death by misadventure”) that anything really changed.

Then there were the baby farming scandals of the 1870s, in which people who were supposed to be fostering children (many orphaned, but most were the children of unwed or widowed mothers who had to work in grueling factory conditions, and couldn’t care for their own children) were systematically murdering them.

Or people like H.H. Holmes, who’s “murder hotel” was shut down in 1894, but not before he murdered (then either dismembered and sold to medical schools, or incinerated) between 100 and 200 people (modern serial killers are amateurs by comparison).

We live in this delusion that our modern world is more brutal and uncaring than “the good old days.” An event like a theatre shooting happens, and we tut-tut about how much more dangerous our modern world is.

Never mind that murder rates have been going down for centuries. The murder rate, as a percentage of the population, is far, far lower in 2012 than it was in 1812. Never mind that in the 18th and 19th century the overwhelming majority of deaths were due to violence, accident, or illness that is now preventable. It is only in relatively recent times that most people can look forward to the probability of dying of old age, rather than any of those other things.

The times are not getting more brutal. People are not more uncaring than we used to be.

And the solution is definitely not to turn back the clock. We’ve been steadily decreasing the number of deaths suffered through violence, industrial accident, and so forth for a couple of hundred years by incrementally improving how we do things—and sometimes that means imposing regulations with real penalties.

Fear, itself

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In December, 1999, a U.S. Customs agent in Port Angeles, Washington became suspicious of one passenger driving his car off a ferry from Canada, and asked him to step out of the car. While she was trying to get him to answer questions while she checked his passport, other customs agents searched the car, and found a large number of bags and bottles of suspicious substances. The driver fled on foot, was tackled a few blocks away, and arrested.

Experts quickly determined that the materials in the car were ingredients to build a very big bomb, and soon put the pieces together of a plot to set the bomb off at the Los Angeles International Airpot on New Year’s Eve.

In Seattle, a suddenly nervous mayor and city council feared that there might be more bombers out there, and announced they were considering canceling the New Year’s Eve fireworks display at the Space Needle, just in case. People were upset. Businesses that had spent a lot of money for the celebration were very upset. People argued that canceling the celebration would be the same as surrendering to the terrorists.

After bit of sturm und drang, the officials agreed to let the fireworks go forward. But the park around the Space Needle would be fenced off, so the public could not come in. Some private property owners offered to clear out a couple of nearby parking lots so people could gather there. And the fireworks happened.

And Mayor Paul Schell (whose embarrassing defeat in the primary election the next year has earned him a bit of immortality, as reporters in Western Washington now refer to the act of an incumbent failing to advance from the primary to general elected as being “Schelled”) earned a new nickname: Mayor Wimp.

The stupid part was that fencing off the park didn’t put anyone in any less danger. Since the parking lots were announced days in advanced, any theoretical bombers could have placed their bomb near one of those parking lots and caused a horrific number of deaths. The only thing that the fencing did was make sure that those tragic deaths would happen on private property, so the city would theoretically not be liable.

As if a good legal team couldn’t argue the city was still somewhat culpable because the city told people to gather at the parking lots.

It’s tempting, when some horrible thing like a bombing, a shooting spree, or a threat of such a thing happens, for people to run around frantically doing things to keep people safe. Just in case someone else is planning the same thing. Or in case someone decides to copy the sociopath.

Bank robber Willie Sutton (who stole about 2 million dollars during the 30s, 40s, and 50s, and spent more than half his life in jail) is said to have once answered that he picked banks because “that’s where the money is.” He probably never actually said those words, but they remain true nonetheless.

The Millenium Bomber wasn’t targeting LAX because he had a grudge against that airport. The Theatre Gunman didn’t target The Dark Knight Rises because he hates Batman movies. These places are picked because that’s where people are.

And the reason no one was killed in a bomb blast near the Space Needle on New Year’s Eve, 1999, wasn’t because nervous officials fenced off the park. It was because no bomber was targeting Seattle that holiday.

If we all suddenly decide not to got to the movies, the next nutjob will just figure out where the most people will be, and he’ll go there. Hiding isn’t a solution.

There isn’t an easy solution. We can look at better ways to enforce gun laws and better ways to deliver mental health care. We can try to pay a bit more attention to our surroundings. We can try to increase the amount of goodwill and mutual respect in society. Those things won’t cure the problem, but just like that Customs Agent who had a hunch, sometimes we’ll get lucky.

Esteemages, Self or Otherwise, part #314

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I was having a wide-ranging talk with a friend last night, and I found myself quoting another friend. “There’s a part of me that lives in constant fear that other people are going to figure out that I’m just faking it. That I’m not really all grown up, et cetera.”

And he said he is continually amazed (and somewhat heartened) at how many people he thinks of as pretty accomplished confess to that feeling. “It’s sort of comforting to know I’m not the only one.”

The thing is, there’s another part of me, possibly a bigger part, that is probably the world’s most arrogant man imaginable. That part of me is absolutely convinced that there is not a single problem in the world—heck, in the universe!—that I can’t fix, if I just have the time. That part of me knows it can figure out anything, just given some time to study the situation.

And somewhere in between is a practical part of me that knows some problems are intractable. But it can only reign in the arrogant one with the argument that we have to pick our battles. We don’t have time to solve everything, and besides, we should have some fun every now and then.

I don’t completely understand how the arrogant guy and the “I don’t know what I’m doing!” guy live in the same head, but I’ve had to come to accept it.

This morning I had the following epiphany: I know that there are things I’m really good it. Even “I don’t know what I’m doing!” me knows that we are freaky good at diagnosing certain kinds of computer problems and finding work-arounds. I know it. I’m constantly doing it at work. I receive frequent compliments and expressions of gratitude from other people for helping them with these things.

But, there’s that niggling suspicion that the reason so few other people are good at it is not because it is the result of a particular talent, but more because it isn’t really that important. Everyone else secretly knows that there will always be one idiot savant who actually can fix these weird issues (or at least show you how to recover your work and make the application produce what you need). It’s not worth their time to learn how to think like this and do those things, see?

Objectively, I know that isn’t true, but this comes from that irrational part of the brain. There is always going to be that doubt that these things I’m good at aren’t anywhere near as difficult or important as they seem to me.

There’s also the fact that I don’t want to turn into the arrogant jerk all the time. There are plenty of them out there, already. So the practical me understands the value of that self-doubt. Self-esteem unchecked is bad for myself, people around me, and the world at-large. Unchecked self-doubt is pretty destructive, too. There needs to be a balance.

Acknowledge your own talents. When you do something, do it with confidence, but never forget that you can make mistakes. And when those mistakes happen, don’t despair, don’t deny, don’t ignore. Fix them.

Good luck with that (haters gonna….)

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So some of the usual suspects (*cough* American Family Association *cough*) have gotten something in a twist because Google is endorsing the “radical” notion that people shouldn’t be executed just for being gay. That’s the issue that kicked off the Legalise Gay campaign, in case you didn’t know.

So these people, who claim to follow that guy who said “love your neighbor as yourself” and “why do you worry about the speck in your neighbor’s eye and pay no attention to the log in your own?” are calling for a boycott of Google because Google is opposed to mortal violence against gay people.

Boycott Google? That’s going to be interesting.

Let’s forget about products like smart phones running Google’s Android OS, and services like GoogleDocs and such, and just think about their core business: search. So, who are they going to use? Bing?

Not that they can’t, but here’s the thing: a couple of decades back Bing’s owner, Microsoft, decided that maybe they should have a lobbyist go down to the state capital here in my home state (which is also Microsoft’s home state) because that’s what successful companies do. They polled their employees, including managers and executives, about what the lobbyist should suggest the legislators do. The overwhelming consensus: pass some statewide Gay rights law.

Not lobby for a tax break (that sort of thing would come later), but lobby for Gay rights.

And that’s what they did. Even now when the company (IMHO) has lost much of its way and become just another lumbering short-term profit making beast, it still sponsors and supports gay events, provides health benefits to same-sex partners, lobbied for the full domestic partnership refendum a couple years ago, the marriage equality referendum coming up for a vote soon, and in pretty much every way is at least as supportive of Gay rights as Google.

Yahoo, like most other large tech companies also has gay-friendly corporate policies and has sponsored gay rights events. It’s difficult to find a large tech company in the western world that hadn’t twigged to the fact a bit ago that one way to attract and retain talented employees is to be inclusive and supporting of, among others, gay employees.

So for search alone, they’re going to be hard-pressed to find an alternative that isn’t supportive of gay rights. I don’t see how a boycott is even possible.

As an aside, for the allies and defenders of the AFA and their ilk, getting angry because a company or person suggests that maybe gay people shouldn’t be executed just because they love who they love? That is advocating violence against gays. It isn’t a misinterpretation or distortion. It is exactly what they are doing.

And exactly what you are defending.

Failing to learn from history…

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Growing up in Southern Baptist Churches (though not, technically, in the South), I was taught that the denomination was formed during the Civil War. Because there was an actual war going on, annual conventions couldn’t meet. Also, I was told, a lot of the northern churches were mixed up in politics and had been looking for an excuse to ditch the southern churches who were more concerned with missionary work.

Later, I learned that almost every last one of those details was utterly false.

The Southern Baptist Churches split off from the nationwide Triennial Baptist Convention 15 years prior to the Civil War. The primary reason they split was that the Southern Churches were pro-slavery. They were extremely pro-slavery, arguing that God picked which people were born one race or another because he knew which ones needed to be subservient, and which needed to be in charge. Most of the people who attended Baptist churches in the North were anti-slavery, and thought that all humans, being God’s children, should be equal before the law.

Continue reading Failing to learn from history… →

Pop goes the culture

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In childhood most of your cultural experiences are dictated by your family. Particularly when I was a kid, when the typical family had, at most, one TV and one stereo music system. I was lucky enough to have parents who believed in reading and being cheap, so except in those towns we lived in that were too small to have a public library, most of my childhood involved near weekly trips to the local library.

For other things, we had church music, TV, my parents’ record collection, and radio. And most of the towns we lived in were so small there was only one local AM radio station. Which didn’t really matter, because our house, like most of our neighbors’ had the TV and stereo in the same room. So you watch/listened to what Mom or Dad wanted.

Continue reading Pop goes the culture →

When words move you

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There’s this silly “alternate weekly” here in Seattle, the Stranger, that I read all the time. I admit, sometimes I read it to see what crazy thing one of them is going to say this time. But I also read it because several of the writers are good, and even when they aren’t, they often cover stories no one else does. The story I’m about the link for you was covered by lots of people. It was about a horrific double-rape, murder and attempted murder. About a pair of women waking up, one with a knife to her throat, the evening after they had a fitting for the dresses for their commitment ceremony. Only one of the women survived, and eventually she testified before a jury about that night.

Eli Sanders wrote a series of stories about the crime, the investigation, the perpetrator, and the process of how we, as a society, investigate and handle horrific crimes. All of the stories were good, but he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for the tale of testimony the surviving partner eventually was able to give.

He called it, The Bravest Woman in Seattle. I cried the first time I read it last summer. I cried when I tried to explain to someone about the story that made me cry. I cried when I read again today after learning it had won a Pulitzer. I cried when I tried to tell Michael the link I was looking for.

Back in the days I was writing for college newspapers and thinking of possibly going into journalism as a career, that’s the kind of story you hoped someday you would get to tell.

Oh, puhlease!

people,

A couple times a year I have an experience on the bus that, when I tell the story, it brings people out of the woodwork to talk about how horrible transit it. This morning was one of those days.

So I don’t want to tell the story. I don’t want to enable people to bash transit by choosing my anomalous experience and treating it as if it is normal.

I’d much rather talk about things like the adorable kid on the bus the day before, dressed in a Batman raincoat (complete with cape!) who was delighted when he saw a dog curled up beneath the feet of another passenger and asked, “May I please pet your doggie?”

Or another kid a few weeks ago, wearing an equally adorable tiger stocking cap, who asked her mother, “When can we go back to the library?”

Or the many times I’ve looked up from the word processor on my iPhone (yes, I have a word processor on my phone; I write scenes to stories while riding the bus to work) to see that most of the passengers sitting around me were reading. Some were reading paper books, some Kindles, some reading on iPads.

Or the time I watched a young man scribbling extremely fast in a thick, very battered looking notebook. I couldn’t see what he was writing, yet even from the distance I could see that his writing was pretty, with sweeping open loops–even though we was writing as if the pen point was in a race to the death against a rocket assisted member of the order chiroptera exiting the underworld.

Or the many conversations that have made me smile.

I don’t want to talk about the two jerks on this morning’s bus (other than this: hon, the 90s are calling, and they want their dance moves back). Maybe I’ll post a version of the tale to I, Anonymous.