Gadzooks, change can be disconcerting. A part of us would like to cling to the old or established way of doing things. It's just for the sake of our peace of mind. I have read that in the digital age, this just doesn't work. The digital ways pull at us and demand compliance. You might need special help, in which case you had just better go out and get it.
Will gas-powered cars become illegal in the not-too-distant future? If so, is it a mistake to buy a new gas-powered car now? A person has to go out and try to get answers.
I became aware this past summer of a family in town that apparently reasoned that there was no urgency for getting their mail address updated for the 9-1-1 system. I figure that the family assumed "oh, the local post office knows who we are, what our address is." That's the old Norman Rockwell-inspired framework for thinking. Doesn't work now.
I started getting a lot of that family's mail.
Computers are being relied upon for reading addresses, pushing efficiency. It's something we should assume. You can still send a letter with a handwritten address, yes even cursive - at least as of recently this was true - but who knows what lies ahead? Really, who knows? What can we rule out?
Political correctness was always nice to a certain point. A lot of it is in line with the Judeo-Christian ethic. Some of these developments give us a jolt, then we move on with normal life. We were all Neanderthals once when we accepted driving cars without a seat belt requirement? Maybe considering the disco music of the 1970s, we were. That's a joke. Disco was OK but it got overdone.
Seat belt started as a secondary offense. Surveys showed that's the way the public wanted it. So what happened with the over-arching reach of government?
If you were to ask our former Morris Police Department officers - they are all "former" now, or soon to be - they might tell you it's a pain staring in order to see if people have belts on. There are cars with tinted windows. Sometimes these go over a line and the people get citations. I sometimes notice tinted windows that are presumably within the law, and no way could an officer notice lack of seat belt use. So that seems fundamentally unfair.
Our Morris city council passed its water softener law. The fault there was probably the way our newspaper handled it. Big front page article with clear insinuation about how no one needed a softener any more. "You are wasting money on salt." Really? If that's true, why didn't the City of Morris have a system ready to go for relieving people of their water softeners? The whole matter ended up not that simple.
The government must always reach out to people who might be confused. Either that, or we're too busy to pay attention to every little thing that comes along. Like, whether or not gas-powered cars really will become illegal in the next five or ten years. "How would it be enforced?" a guy at my dealership said. As with the water softeners, there's a cavern of confusion.
The new ideas or requirements point to perfection, elevated standards. Which can be fine in theory. But then we see encroachment on our daily lives as these ideas get empowered.
A new wrinkle
So, do you know what the new type of "harassment" is? You might think this is a little outlandish. Always pause your laughter though. My generation in the '70s would have laughed about mandatory seat belt use, as we listened to the Bee Gees. Look what came along.
Even the prohibitions on smoking in public places seemed a bridge too far at first. This is one change where I think we all can be totally comfortable by now. Smoking had been so ensconced in our culture. Look at any number of old movies. Go in a restaurant and the air might be "blue," as it was often described. (It didn't seem literally "blue" to me, but the odor was annoying.)
Yet it was considered a faux pas to complain about smoking when out in public. Given the huge anti-smoking push, and the cost of cigarettes, I am surprised so many people still choose to smoke. Stand in line at a convenience store and most likely there will be customers ahead of you asking for cigarettes which the clerk retrieves from behind the counter. An impulse in me wants to ask some of these people "why?" A lot of them look like they're barely getting by.
Well if they have student loans, they've gotten a break! So we'll get more inflation. The Fed will have to push up interest rates, as the Fed chair emphasized on Friday. And the elevated rates will endanger the stock market? Oh, but nothing seems to endanger the stock market. Many of us have come to live with that truism. No risk in the stock market? What a sea change, because when I was a kid my parents drilled into my head that stocks were risky.
Political correctness encompasses the objectification of women, a total no-no (except in men's private thoughts of course).
But now there is a new dimension. That's why I'm writing this post today. Now we're beginning to hear about "staring" as an actual form of harassment. Heavens to Betsy, if the cops had a hard time tracking down all the scofflaws not wearing seat belts, how is this one going to be incorporated, normalized? Talk about a bridge too far, maybe this is it.
It is hugely subjective to try to determine if staring crosses the line to something unacceptable, n'est-ce pas? We have two eyes on our head. I am particularly concerned as a person who lives alone and conducts his life basically alone. It's tough sometimes presenting yourself as normal.
Are we at the point where we must be reminded of the old wisdom of how "the perfect is the enemy of the good?" Humanity will always have a certain percentage of those who are below average in the propriety of their behavior. In the old days we were aware of "characters" in our small towns, just like "Otis" from the Andy Griffith show. Again I am conjuring up Norman Rockwell's America. We depended on people's normal good judgment, like relying on the post office people to just "know" where the mail goes.
Nope. Be precise, follow the rules. But a prohibition on "staring?" I'll make no assumptions about how this is too much, will not happen. I would have made the same assumption once about seat belts or smoking restrictions.
Let people have their peccadilloes? Not any more. Unless the economy crashes so bad, we'll just have to start thinking about our survival. Maybe the stock market has been succeeding with smoke and mirrors. That's what I'm thinking now.
- Brian Williams - morris mn minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com
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