Bill Edwards

Bill Edwards

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Too Safe

Just how stupid and/or irresponsible are we becoming? Over the years I've noticed that we've become so safety conscience and so dependent on "smart" devices like our phones that we've become dumber. It may have started with the warning on cigarette packages around 1964. The warning told us something we already knew: "Cigarette smoking can be damaging to your health." Tip me off Dick Tracy! It's gotten progressively worse as suing overtook baseball as America's favorite pastime. Warning labels started popping up on everything with increasing levels of imbecility with warnings on a hair dryer warning not to use it in the shower. And not only do flight attendants have to tell you to buckle your seat belt but they have to give an extensive demonstration. As comedian Blake Clark used to say, "Anyone who doesn't know how to buckle their seat belt by now, they don't deserve to survive the crash--it's time to thin the herd!" If you purchase a ladder notice the warning label on the side that stretches almost as long as the ladder is tall and buy an OTC medicine you have to get out the magnifying glass to read all the warnings while trying to find the actual instructions to take it is way down the list. The result is no one reads them. It's too much to consume and it overstates the obvious. And the warnings are getting increasingly dire! Any half of any prescription medicine ad is taken up with the possible side affects and so much so that when they're finished you think the cure is worse than the disease. Since the cigarette warning didn't stop people from smoking the government and some agencies have produced PSAs to scare you with people who've had mouth and/or throat cancer showing us a "before-and-after" picture of a handsome young man or attractive young woman and now they're emaciated and unrecognizable from the younger picture. Still not convinced to stop? A federal judge a few years back wanted tobacco manufacturers to start putting real photos of diseased, cancerous lungs. Fortunately it didn't happen but the fact that someone thought of it is beyond pathetic. Let's take that one step further. The auto fatality rate in the USA is somewhere around 60,000 people a year on our highways. What if every car dealership, instead of having pictures of their cars in the showroom or in their ads on billboards, magazines and television had to put pictures of car crashes with dead bodies lying around? Yes, driving a car is dangerous and you are literally taking your life into your hands every time you get behind the wheel and don't think that if I thought of it, someone or some organization hasn't thought of it too.

There are so many safety features of products now it's almost impossible to use them. To get a butane lighter to work you have to pull back on some spring-loaded switch while pulling the trigger. Within the last couple of years I've almost returned two products to the store because I couldn't get them to work. Turns out, I had not engaged all the safety devices. You can't just turn things on anymore without all sorts of hoops of fire to jump through. On the food processor I almost returned, the carafe had to be mounted on top of the motor through a slotted device and then rotate it 45-degrees to lock it down. Then, after putting all the ingredients into said carafe the top has to be put on and rotated to a locked position before the on-off switch would work. Every new subdivision I've been to in the last ten years or more have a beautiful recreation area with what appears to be a beautiful pool. But not a single pool has a diving board anymore because very few are more than four feet deep. Fortunately I live in a community that still has a REAL swimming pool with a 12-foot deep end and is, as far as I know, the only pool left in Chatham County with a high dive. We have lived there and been a member of said pool for 21 years and in that time there has not been a single injury. Kids as young as four scramble up that ladder and go jumping or diving off by the carload and (fingers crossed) no one's been injured in any way with the exception of an occasional belly flop--now THAT hurts! Recovery, however, is quite rapid and they're back at it minutes later.

Now we have "smart" phones and I'm as guilty as anyone depending on it way too much. Quick: rattle off ten phone numbers you know by heart! I can't. I've forced myself to memorize co-host Laura's number just in case I need to call her from my home phone or a borrowed phone. And now it's our cars...start to drift out of your lane and it pulls you back, coming up on another vehicle and it slows you down or comes to a complete stop. It beeps and blips if another car is approaching alongside and even talks to you. No key anymore, you have a device that allows you to start the car so long as you have your foot on the brake first. Backup cameras, overhead cameras, and it talks to you as well. Yes, I'm glad that "corporate America" and others are looking out for our safety but is it making us more careless? I see young people walking with their earbuds in looking at their phones walking down the sidewalks and if you stood directly in front of them they'd walk right into you. When will the phones start warning the owner of their collision course? All these warnings lead to us paying less and less attention to them. If the car is doing most of the safety work, we begin to quit worrying about it so much and then, perhaps, now at all. One of the complaints pilots who fly Air Bus model aircraft say that the computers do so much it's difficult for them to take over if an emergency presents itself the computer can't cope with. Think a computer could have done what "Sully" did ditching that plane on the Hudson River a few years ago? While I do appreciate all the safety devices we have I hope it won't make us less diligent but, being human, I fear it will.


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