Who can protect me now? Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Woke up this morning to the first ice on the walk since the
October snow wrecked my trees.
I ought to be grateful, and I suppose I am, that this winter
has been so mild as compared to last year this time when the residue of the
post Christmas snow storm still cluttered the streets.
Ice doesn’t sit well with me because I live near the bottom
of a very steep hill, which I have to climb in order to get to public
transportation.
Even when I had two eyes and could drive, climbing this hill
was not fun, all spinning wheels and
prayers that I didn’t slide all the way down to where the street meets the
highway and the parade of tractor trailers making their way north from Port
Newark.
Last year, walking down the hill, my wife and I both slipped
on the same piece of pavement on the same night, but about an hour apart. This
stretch is owned by some old mobster, who rarely shovels his walk, except to
make a path for his Seville to park in, and never puts out salt when his pavers
get slick.
We learned to walk on the far side of the street where the
Head Start staff keeps their walks clean, but even then, melting snow or ice
intrudes, leaving slick patches.
This morning being the first morning of ice, nobody put out
salt so that the walk and street proved an even steeper challenge than usual,
forcing pedestrians to cling to fence posts, car mirrors and any other
protrusion to keep from falling.
Two women who also survived the climb pondered why news
stations didn’t issue icing reports the way they sometimes did for snow,
warning people that we risk life and limb if we go out at this particular time.
I guess we’ve been warned too much about every possible
disaster, from terrorists to hurricanes that we’ve come to rely on someone
telling us when to duck.
I remember some misguided woman who wrote about the history
of children’s playgrounds, talking about how they were supposed to be safe for
children – obviously misreading the reasoning and logic behind the original
construction.
She tried to explain why playground got rid of concrete and
asphalt and installed rubberized floors, as yet the next step in keeping
children safe.
It’s not true. At least not all of it.
Playgrounds were made hard because they were built mostly in
a working class era when parents needed to prepare their kids for the harsh
realities of the world, and figured scuffed knees and bruised elbows taught
children more about life than any lecture did.
As our nation abandoned the working class model and pressed
people to aspire to middle and upper class values, we grew more afraid for our
children, coddling them more, seeking more protection against things like
asphalt. We did not want our previous progeny injured, and so we sought to warn
them against things instead of letting them experience things first hand.
This idea that I have to make my own way in the world and
deal with situations like ice and snow make me appreciate things better. I
hated getting yellow and red terrorist alerts from a government too inept to
protect me and yet left me with no way to protect myself.
We have divorced ourselves from FDR’s idea that fear is the
only thing we need to fear, and we are constantly being encouraged to be
afraid, warned of potential dangers – some of which we are helpless to avoid.
Perhaps this harkens back to the air raid drills I underwent
as a kid, when nu ns at my school shouted for me to duck under my desk, when we
all knew the desk couldn’t save us if someone dropped a nuclear bomb, and the
least anybody owed us was to let me see the flash before it was all over.
The fact is the government doesn’t protect me – at least not
from terrorists or bombs – but it makes a good show of saying it does, doing as
much to make me scared to look around me as the terrorists or the soviets
would.
Maybe we do need someone to tell us to look down at our own
feet when we walk, to remind us that there is a real world that we should be
aware of in order to protect ourselves, but I’m pretty sure the people who warn
of us everything else, aren’t the people I trust to look out for my interests.
I need to look out for my own, play in a playground that isn’t made too safe
for me to ever injure myself, to walk on a sidewalk which the local mobster is
punished for not keeping clear, to look up when the bomb drops so at least I
get to see the beauty of its flash.
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