I stood at the top of a flight of stairs at a high school I visited today, and I saw those stairs as if I had never seen stairs before. They were a steep and high irregular obstacle that promised grievous injury if not sudden death with just the slightest misstep.
I don’t know if you ever stood at the top of a flight of stairs and looked down them and said “Holy crap! You could die on these things.”
I’m afraid of heights, but I’m not afraid of stairs, probably because I don’t think of stairs as heights, but the fact is, stairs can be high. If you took a running jump, you could fall fifty vertical feet without touching anything. If you fall, there is all those hard edges and metal.
Fortunately for me, I grew up knowledgeable about the theory and practice of stairs, and I was able to navigate them safely. But, it occured to me that somebody who was unfamiliar with the concept of stairs who came and visited and saw these things would think we were insane for having such deathtraps in our schools.
We all know how to work stairs, but they’'re deadly.
Imagine if we went from room to room on the upper stories of buildings, by climbing out the windows and walking on an unprotected ledge along the outside of the building.
That would seem pretty stupid, wouldn’t it?
Well, at least that ledge is flat.
Later I drove down a two lane highway at speeds of up to fifty miles an hour while traffic came at me at the same speed in the opposite lane just a few feet away from me.
I thought nothing of it.
Yet, with a mere two inch twist of my wrist, I could have sent my hurtling machine colliding with another at a combined impact velocity of 100mph!
But, I sat there opening a soda, and eating a donut, and listening to the radio, and generally not paying much attention to the fact that I was travelling on the very ragged edge of sudden death, a sudden death basically averted by what seems like inhuman vigilance and protracted accuracy, as my hand rests casually on the steering wheel! Just one slip!
You’re not impressed, are you?
Try this idea on then.
If you are at a rifle range, everybody stands at the same end of the rifle range, and fires down to the targets that are all on the other end of the rifle range. When everybody is done, you put down your gun and in synchronized fashion you all walk down and retrieve and replace your targets.
We do it this way because it is inherently stupid to do it any other way.
Imagine if you went to a rifle range where everybody alternated. You stand at your station at the rifle range, and a couple of feet to the left is a target. You look down the rifle range, and there’s a guy at the other end, and he’s going to be shooting at this target right next to you. Just to the right of him is your target.
You all take your ten shots, shooting at each other, errr, at the targets next to your opposite at the other end of the range, and when you’re done, you score and change each other’s targets.
The problem with this setup is that you will be shooting in the general direction of other people, and they will be shooting in your general direction. You will spend your afternoon with bullets whizzing by within a few feet of your body.
Would you shoot at such a range?
Well, then why would you drive on a two lane road? Think about it. A rifle is a precision instrument. Even without a scope, one is commonly shooting with the precision that puts the bullet downrange into a bullseye the size of a pencil eraser. You are shooting with discretion in fractions of centimeters. Your control over that bullet is basically absolute when compared to the gross instrument of an automobile.
Can you control the accuracy of the vehicle you drive with the discretion of fractions of centimeters?
Not even the best drivers in the world have control over their vehicles to the same degree that even the most beginner of marksman’s has over his rifle.
If you watch people drive, this lack of fine control is readily apparent. People drift to the left and right a couple of feet in their lanes as they go along, sometimes too close to the center, other times to close to the breakdown lane. back and forth we drift, as we hurtle recklessly along.
And, there are cars doing exactly the same thing, with similarly unimpressed out of control drivers hurtling towards you in the other direction, missing you by a couple of feet or less!
And the road twists and turns, rises and falls, so our analogy breaks down.
Our hypothetical rifle range with half the people on one side and half the people on the other side shooting in each other’s general direction is a much more regulated and controlled environment than that road.
To make the analogy fit, you’d have to imagine one of those 3-d ranges, you’ve seen them in the movies. The kind where you wander around, and targets pop up and you shoot at them. Some of them are bad guys and some of them are good guys.
To make the anology fit, imagine one of those ranges where they just let everybody in at the same time, from all different directions, and they just fire at will.
That’s what the road is like. That’s the inherent nature of the evironment., except we all have a lot less control of our cars, than our rifles.
And yet everyday I willingly go onto this insane mutual suicide system and hurtle about inches and feet from other drivers, with only a very imprecise and general control system.
Just like that range, everybody is trusting in my skill and accuracy as I must trust in everybody else’s or else we all die!
So I drive, munching a donut, or talking on a cell phone, or listening to the radio, and I think so little of it, I’ll load my wife and kid into one of these machines and take them out on this insane high speed obstacle course with me.
That’s driving.
What must it look like to an outside observer?
We are blind to the nature of this endeavor because it is so common, yet every now and then it comes back to me in full force just how dangerous what we are doing is. Usually this is when I go back to visit NYC and drive on those streets. I used to do it casually, but now it’s an exercise in terror. The fact is that it has always been an insane exercise in sheer terror, I just forgot because I was used to it.
Yet, if we stop at a gas station we are greeted with a warning that gas is inflammable and dangerous to swallow!
There are warning tags on appliances telling us not to use them in the tub.
These warnings seem a little bit like telling a guy in the middle of a firefight that he needs a scarf so he doesn’t catch cold. Insane.
The whole thing is insane. We just forget because we’re used to it.
I just wanted to remind you.
