Societal Nuts
The news is abuzz with a story about “swatting.”
What is swatting? I figured it had something to do with flies or, perhaps, it was a new street lingo euphemism for something disgusting (sexual) done in bed. I was wrong on both counts. Like everything important in life, Wikipedia provides illumination:
Swatting is the tricking of any emergency service (via such as a 9-1-1 dispatcher) into dispatching an emergency response based on the false report of an on-going critical incident.
Source: Wikipedia – Swatting
A particularly nasty version of swatting is when you hoax the police into sending a SWAT (Special Weapons And Tactics) response to the home of your sworn enemy and kicking in their door, possibly shooting them while they reach for their salad fork and generally ruining their day. This is the sort of thing kids consider to be trendy these days.
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Outside
Next time on Biography…
I’m on the outside
Lookin’ in
Oh I’m an outsider outside of everything
Oh I’m an outsider outside of everything
Oh I’m an outsider outside of everything
Everything you know
Everything you know
It disturbs me so
It’s trendy these days, or so it seems to me, for some among us to run around having conniptions of kittens because some law might apply to them and … gasp of horrors … they never had the opportunity to sign off on it first.
Well, la dee frickin’ dah! Who the fuck are you? Apparently I forgot that any one of me is worth a hundred of you. You’re special. You’re important. Me? I’m the official spokesperson for The Rest Of Us. Also known as the Wretched Refuse, the tired, poor huddled masses of the homeless, tempest-tost. I’m the elected leader of those not worthy to be ground to mush to fill the empty spaces in the waffle treads of your Nike footwear.
I’m the stranger in a strange land. As I look around and apply logic to what I see, the message comes in loud and clear. I do not belong.
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Hittin’ Run
Sadly, binary is not a workable template for real world problems. Most things are just not that simple. They don’t fit neat and tidy in the binary box. Oh, how I wish they would.
Drive drunk? I feel that should be classified as “attempted murder.” Society, as usual, doesn’t agree with me. “No jail time for killing four pedestrians while driving with a BAC three times over the legal limit and not even old enough to drink.” That wee bit of difference of opinion on punishment makes me an outlier, I guess. Of course, that’s an extreme example, yet to my way of thinking, punishment in even garden variety DUII cases falls woefully short.
Cheat on your spouse? That should also be “attempted murder.” It’s all so simple to me. Pick up a deadly disease, bring it to your marital bed, and pay it forward with a potential disease that could theoretically kill the person who trusts you the most. There should be serious punishment for that. Far too often the only real punishment is going back to your regular life like nothing ever happened. Not much of a deterrent, eh?
In brief, my point is that without certain and meaningful consequence there is absolutely no limit on behavior. Period.
I believe a certain percentage of people just don’t give a shit. Perhaps they are motivated by drug addiction. Perhaps they are psychopaths and/or sociopaths and it’s what they do. Maybe they were brought into the world and damaged beyond repair by parents, environment and random events. Whatever the reason, it makes little difference in the end. The outcomes are similar. The themes of destruction and causing harm are remarkably consistent.
We tend to expect it from these folks. No big surprises there.
What about the rest of us? We’re good, right?
Hold on. Let’s not be too hasty.
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Police State
I ask if you will agree with this humble hypothesis:
Actions without consequence tend to repeat.
–Tom B. Taker
Do you agree or disagree with this statement?
If you stick a fork in an electrical socket and it shocks you, are you likely to do it again? If you touch a hot stove and get burned are you in a hurry to touch it some more?
Tell a dog to stay off the sofa and shoo him away a single time. The rest of the time allow him to lounge all over the bloody thing to his heart’s content. What lesson do you think the dog has learned?
Do you know about the most powerful force in the universe? It’s a child when improperly parented. That particular organism has the potential, in the right circumstances, to learn faster than any form of life we’ve ever encountered. Tell a child, “No, you cannot have the cookie.” Now comes the tricky part: Let the child eat all the cookies it wants. Maybe you’re busy playing Farmville. Maybe you’re composing your next tweet. Maybe, just maybe, you’re sick enough in the head to be doing it on purpose. Whatever. You can bet your life that the message has been received loud and clear. It’s the most instantaneous form of training we’ve ever discovered.
Try to teach them something important and it’s like pounding your head against a wall. But being assholes? That they absorb like sponges.
As I often try to do in my writings, I’m cleverly building to a point. It seems pretty obvious that a lack of consequences does not generally lead to good things. That child? She’s a future Chloe who has a shit fit on national television because her parents bought her a new car for her 16th birthday but it wasn’t an Escalade. She hates them, she does. Poor baby.
Have you accepted the hypothesis yet?
I was thinking about all of this when I violently had one of those aha moments. What if the precocious child in this story was the internet? And what if the role of mommy and daddy was played by the police? What might that look like?
Per usual I’ll begin with a charming anecdote and then slowly build up to the hate. Join me, won’t you? It’ll be fun!
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Here’s to bad decisions, tonight is kinda special
An otherwise beautiful young person stood in court handcuffed and wearing an orange jump suit. Tearfully they addressed the court.
“I’m sorry for what I did,” they sobbed. “Fleeing the scene of the accident is the biggest mistake of my life.”
I do not doubt the sincerity. The young person was just sentenced to more than three years in prison. Also a mother, the woman was losing her son. I do, however, doubt the judgment. I doubt the assessment that the decision to run was the mistake. Sadly it was only the tip of a titanic-sized iceberg and wasn’t the first or last lapse of judgement on her part.
Where did things go awry? It was hours before the accident when a totally sober person made the decision to embark on an evening of drink with no thought process to address simple questions like, “How will I get myself home?”
The person who made that decision, although fully conscious, uncompromised and presumably rational, didn’t stop to consider the possibility of fateful events. Such planning didn’t rise to the level of being important. There was fun to be had.
Of course, we all know decision-making skills hit the toilet as soon as strong drink hits the gullet. That’s the way it works. No big surprise there. That’s why it’s prudent to make such important decisions and plans well before the alcohol begins to flow.
The record shows the young person didn’t exercise much care when it came to driving. Her driver’s license had been suspended at least four times since 2009. She had at least 12 convictions on traffic offenses (none DUII related) since 2007. Offenses included speeding, not wearing a seat belt, driving with a suspended license, and use of a cell phone while driving.
Without a plan and legally intoxicated, the decision was made. The young person would operate a motor vehicle while drunk. It would be a fateful night.
Meanwhile, not too far away, a bicyclist had a flat tire. In the dark and on the side of the road, he was then hit from behind by the drunk driver. He was sent to the hospital ICU unit. He suffered several broken bones, including both legs, a ruptured spleen and other minor injuries.
The driver did not stop. She did not render assistance to her victim. Her alcohol-addled brain deduced (rightfully so) that she’d get in trouble. It was her choice to flee. Apparently what she was unable to deduce was that her very best option at that moment was to do the right thing. And that was something her hobbled mind was unable to fathom.
It didn’t end there, though.
Later, once she was sober and presumably had her normal decision-making abilities restored, her next move was to take her car to a body shop in a calculated attempt to conceal what she had done. Luckily someone tipped off police and, finally, once she was left with no other recourse, she made a decision to take responsibility and turn herself in. It was a long time coming and had little meaning by then.
Once again, I conclude things like this come down to a lack of empathy and an inability to reason consequences for our own actions. Young people, it seems to me, are especially prone to this of late. The news reports are rife with hit-and-run cases. It almost feels like hit-and-run is now standard procedure rather than an aberration.
In this case, in addition to jail, the judge also suspended her driver’s license for five years. That feels woefully insignificant to me. Without significant consequences, behavior will not change. She should have lost her driving privileges for life. Not merely because she drove drunk but because of all the choices she made.
Prison isn’t exactly known as a system that churns out improved persons. So, apparently, our future has the possibility of this woman back behind the wheel. I do not like the thought of that.
Human behavior needs an airlock
Houston, I am now ejecting myself out of the airlock without a spacesuit. My beggings will commence in 5... 4... 3...
In space no one can hear you be a dumbass…
“To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.”
–Isaac Newton’s Third Law of Motion (loosely paraphrased)
Of course Newton’s Third Law says pretty much diddly squat about human beings!
Let’s say you are in space and you wish to be a dumbass. What is something dumb you might do? Well, you could load yourself into the airlock, forget to bring your spacesuit, then punch the “open the pod bay door” button.
If you ever get the chance, give it a try. I highly recommend it. Don’t forget to document your results! Should be interesting.
The point here, one that is alien to most of us in America these days, is that actions have consequences. Well, they should. But once you involve those frisky humans consequences can become a quite murky thing.
The thing about the airlock example above is: It is absolute. The situation doesn’t allow for compromise, remorse, begging, forgiveness or anything else. There is no higher reality or force with which to lodge your request for something like a second chance. If you punch that button without a suit you will be sucked off into outer space and die. (Some of you might point out that “sucked out” might be a better choice of phrase. I can only say, “To each their own!”)
There’s a wonderful short story that illustrates the concept of choice and consequences when it is absolutely absolute. It’s called The Cold Equations and it was written by Tom Godwin back in 1954. I first encountered it in a book called The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, which is an incredible anthology of science fiction short stories.
Here’s the summary of The Cold Equations from Wikipedia:
A starship makes the rounds of Earth’s colonies, adhering to a schedule from which it cannot deviate. When reports of a fever outbreak on the frontier planet Woden reach the starship, it drops off an Emergency Dispatch Ship, a space vessel of limited range, with a pilot and the serum that will cure them. The pilot discovers a stowaway, an 18-year-old girl named Marilyn who wants to see her brother, a colonist on Woden. The girl believes that she will have to pay a fine, but the situation is far more serious. The ship only has enough fuel for the pilot and his cargo. Her additional mass will cause the ship to run out of fuel before it can land, dooming both the pilot and the sick colonists. The pilot tries frantically to come up with a solution, but there is no way around the “cold equations”; he does not have sufficient fuel. The best he can do is to alter the ship’s course enough to give her a single hour’s reprieve before she must be jettisoned. In that time, she writes letters to her parents and her brother, talks with the pilot about death and, in the last few minutes, is able to speak with her brother on the radio, allowing them to say their goodbyes. When the horizon of the planet breaks up the radio contact, the girl enters the airlock and is ejected into space.
Now that is the kind of consequence I’m talkin’ about!
That sort of thing, however, is totally and utterly alien in the world of human behavior. In the vast majority of cases boorish human behavior goes completely unpunished and unchecked. There are, in these cases, absolutely no “consequences.”
In some cases, a person may actually be held partially accountable for their actions. (I consider this outcome exceedingly rare.) You’ve heard the expression, “It is easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.” That is this concept in a nutshell. Whine, beg, show remorse, make deals, pray, etc. Do whatever it takes to slither off the hook either complete or partially.
I find myself thinking a lot about this concept after a friggin’ asshole who wouldn’t obey the rules on an aircraft became the straw on some camel’s back. The “camel” will be dealt with by our system, but what about the “straw?”
When has an airline passenger ever faced “consequences” for the behavior we saw in this incident? I’ll bet it’s more rare than me winning the lotto. (Or almost as rare as me buying a lotto ticket.) Does anyone who disobeys the “remain sitting” rule ever get punished? Banned from the airline? Do they even get a stern look from airline management?
Take a look at the world around you. How often can you see the airlock on human behavior being overridden by indifference, injustice or deliberate unfairness? And what are the consequences of never having actual consequences? Is a society totally devoid of civility the ultimate result?
Shouts from the Abyss 
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