Since our governments these days are so concerned about protecting us from things that MIGHT happen, I was wondering if they have time to maybe consider looking a bit more closely at dealing with a few things that actually ARE going wrong.
Backing up, the 'might happen' things I'm talking about are things like mobile phones starting fires at fuel stations and the like , you know, totally nonsensical things..
I mean, now they've created legislation dealing with these things, will they ever let go of it? Will we have to live with fiction, myths and misinformation forever? What message does this send to people - that magical thinking is an OK way of life?
Magical Thinking by the way is a term used by those who study the psychology of children to describe the way an inexperienced young mind with little knowledge of the world sets about explaining things to themselves. It can often be comical to explore the fanciful explanations children come up with.. 'shoes are for walking, so how do the shoes get under the bed each night? They walk there!' .. later in life this is (hopefully) replaced with the knowledge that the child's parents may be responsible for the neatening of the youngsters rooms.
Sometimes it's based on the idea that if they THINK something might happen, they could bring it to pass, othertimes it's just a scrambled mess of factoids stuffed together in a brain trying to make sense of what to them is a brand new world.
I saw a good one at the petrol station the other day, a servo was refusing to serve a motorcyclist who was refusing to remove his helmet - lots of arm waving, gesticulating was going on while the other servo assistant was happily serving an amorphous blob in a burkha. The incongruity of it all seemed funny at the time.
OK, we all know motorcyclists are criminally insane types who hold up fuel stations in every available spare moment when they're not out throwing the finger at speed cameras, and all amorphous blobs in burkhas are exceedingly sensitive to their status as blobs and as such deserve to be treated as women - even crossdressing male blobs..
The legislation passed regarding the use of mobile phones was inspired by fiction from the Land of Oz, home of the ludicrous. Truth be told, young girls in nylon skirts and cutsie car seat covers actually HAVE started many fires at petrol stations. They do this by slithering out of their Gemini's in their specially designed static accumulators, plugging the bowser into their green menaces adorned with 'bad girl' stickers and discharging the full force of their coulomb collectors directly against a metal bit thus precipitating a fireball, then howling they run in ever diminishing flaming circles until someone dumps the contents of a fire extinguisher over them. Personally I think they do it for attention.
While this may be highly amusing to onlookers, it does illustrate the ridiculous situation where a known danger is ignored and a non-threat is treated as highly dangerous. Maybe we should have people remove their clothing and touching an earthed pillar to release the static before fuelling up, I don't know.. mind you, naked people and places to discharge against seems a bit icky when you think about it..
6:31 p.m. - 2005-11-27
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