Missing in Action

The Rev. David Schwartz, and his companion, Cheryl Gibbs, died minutes after impact when their Toyota Corolla left the road near milepost 26, on Highway 26, on June 8th. A state trooper out of Astoria, responding to a 9-1-1 dispatch that bounced back-and-forth between jurisdictions (and left out some critical information in the process), checked both sides of the highway between mileposts 25 and 27 in multiple passes that failed to yield any trace of Schwartz’s car. Elsie-Vinemaple Fire Department members also checked both sides of the highway between the 25 and 27 mile markers, producing exactly the same results.

It’s no surprise that searchers failed to locate the car. In the absence of skid marks or other indicators to pinpoint exactly where Schwartz’s Corolla left the road, searchers hadn’t a clue where to look. That the wrecked car was obscured by heavy brush 20 feet down an embankment and couldn’t be seen from the road further complicated the task. A Civil Air Patrol pilot finally spotted the car from the air on Sunday, July 1st.

Family members of the deceased victims were quick to criticize the Oregon State Police, the 9-1-1 dispatchers who, admittedly, screwed up (but the screw-up had no bearing on whether Schwartz and Gibbs lived or died), the State of Oregon, and even the Portland Police Department for its (non) role in the sorry chain of events.

While I can understand their pain, I don’t understand their anger or their rush to place the blame for this senseless tragedy anywhere except for where the blame rightfully belongs. By that I mean squarely on the victims themselves.

I can hear the howls of outrage: What? Blame the victims (hey, it works in rape cases)? That’s preposterous! Yada, yada, yada . . .!

Damned right, blame the victims. At the time of this particular incident, Schwartz was in violation of at least two Oregon laws; he failed to maintain control of his vehicle, and his seat belt wasn’t fastened. He may have been in violation of others. For certain, had Schwartz been operating within the law none of this would have happened. Untold numbers of people wouldn’t have wasted untold numbers of hours conducting a fruitless search, and Schwartz’s family would have had no excuse to blindly unleash their self-righteous indignation against various Oregon agencies that—regardless of their degree of competence or total lack thereof—tried to help.

Before idiot Californians come to Oregon and do stupid things, the consequences of which they then attribute to Oregonians and the State of Oregon, they should take a hard look at their own incompetence and make the necessary adjustments. They could start by checking their stupidity at the border. If they must hold on to their stupidity, they can always pick it up on the way back.

People like Rev. Schwartz, James Kim, and the mountain climbers that died on Mt. Hood last winter put Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest to the test, and prove it every time. Evolution takes care of its own.

Stupid Publicity Stunts

A few days ago, local news reported on a publicity stunt conducted by a Chicago-area radio or TV station—I’m not sure which it was—in which they dropped a piece-of-crap car 500 feet onto a grid. Whoever “owned” the square on the grid where the car landed became the instant winner of a new Hummer.

Does anyone else see the problems inherent in this deeply flawed concept? What problems, you say? Well, let’s start with the obvious. First, how difficult can it be to hit a stationary target at 500 feet from a hovering helicopter? Seems like it’s too easy to rig the outcome, to me. Wouldn’t it have been fairer to make the drop, from 35,000 feet, from the underbelly of a 747 cargo plane (sans bombsight) as it passes over the city? You could declare whomever the car landed on the winner, and the whole event would have more of a random flavor to it.

A less obvious problem—albeit a more egregious one—concerns the prize that was awarded. A Hummer? Leave it to the media in a city that prides itself on its “green” initiatives to come up with that one. I guess because Hummers aren’t selling well due to high gas prices, GM dealers clear out showrooms by offering bargain-basement prices for Hummers to various media outlets, who then give them away to participants in stupid publicity stunts.

It just goes to show you how misguided and shortsighted American society really is, how egocentric, how selfish, how gluttonous our people are. We behave as if it’s our birthright to overproduce, overconsume, and overspend, and we live in a permanent state of denial while our arrogant greed drives most animal species to the brink of extinction.

The Great American Dream is a global nightmare, people. We’ve got our priorities all wrong and, until we get them right, we’ll continue to be the primary destroyers of the planet we live on. Instead of leading the way in forging solutions to critical national and global issues, U.S. business and political leaders bumble along in hopes that business as usual will save the day, and that all of the problems will just go away if only we ignore them a little while longer.

Has our thinking become so stilted and our vision so narrow that we can’t embrace the idea of multiple winners? Must there always be but one winner and many losers? Whatever happened to win/win?

If the Chicago-area broadcast medium mentioned at the beginning of this rant had its collective head on straight, it would have dropped the Hummer instead of the clunker, then used the combined weight of both vehicles to determine how many Trek bicycles (of equal combined weight) could be given away as prizes.

There would literally be several hundreds of bicycle winners, hundreds of thousands in the Chicago area benefiting from less traffic congestion and decreased energy consumption, millions benefiting from fewer local greenhouse gas emissions, and billions upon billions of life forms around the planet able to breathe a little easier—perhaps even enjoy a few seconds or a few minutes of extended life expectancy—because of this visionary environmental approach to media publicity.

If you want the biggest bang for your publicity buck, you’ve got to impact as many lives as possible, not just one. Think win/win/win/win!

That’s what I’m talkin’ about.

Crossover SUVs

Panel trucks and station wagons were the precursors to the modern-day SUV. Almost every business that made regular pick-ups and/or deliveries in LTL quantities had at least one. Somewhere along the line, panel truck married station wagon, and not long after, SUV was born.

SUV stands for Sports Utility Vehicle, although I’ve never understood where “Sports” enters the equation (unless it has something to do with “soccer mom”). These ungainly contraptions are about as sporty as a comatose quadriplegic, and every bit as exciting.

Some people claim that SUV stands for Stupid Ugly Van, or Shortsighted Utopian Vision, or Silly Urban Vanity, or Supremely Unnecessary Vulgarity. My personal favorite is Seriously Unstable Vehicle, although all of the above designations seem to be equally applicable.

Now there’s something called a “crossover” SUV. Judging from the recent spate of fatal accidents involving SUVs, it’s not hard to figure out how they might have come by that label (which, I might add, is entirely appropriate).

If you’re carrying a tad too much speed on right-hand turns, they tend to cross over the centerline, where they risk smashing head-on into oncoming traffic. Again, carrying a tad too much speed on left-hand turns, they tend to cross over the fog line, where they risk smashing into a tree or running over a cliff.

Crossover, indeed!

Make a Commitment to Environmental Sanity

Now that Earth Day #38 is upon us, it’s time that we, as concerned citizens of good conscience with a penchant for sustainable living, reflect on local, national, and global events of the past year and ask ourselves some really tough questions. Are we, as global stewards, doing enough, both collectively and individually, to spare Earth—and ourselves—the ravages of global climate change? Are we demanding that our civic, corporate, and government leaders advocate for sustainable practices in all segments of our society? Do we hold polluters accountable for the damage they cause to the environment? Have we, as individuals, managed to get our own rapacious consumerism under control? In all cases the answer is no, and that means we have a lot of work to do.

The collective insanity of consumer culture panders to economic greed at the expense of cultural, socioeconomic and environmental sustainability. No society that devours its resources faster than those resources can be renewed can long endure. What we desperately need are visionaries—inventors, planners, designers, engineers, financiers, educators, and entrepreneurs—all working together to create a sane, rational socioeconomic model for sustainable living that the rest of the world not only will want to emulate but can emulate without putting the entire planet in peril.

Capitalism, in its current form, is a fatally flawed economic concept in desperate need of a social conscience. Any economy that systematically consumes all of its resources while simultaneously polluting the environment is headed for certain destruction. Change is still possible, but the time for change is now. Every day of procrastination brings us one day closer to the day of reckoning, and the day of reckoning is not as far away as we think.

Earth Day is a good thing, but Earth Day once a year is not nearly enough. Only when we make every day Earth Day will we begin to show the level of commitment necessary to make, and keep, our world habitable for the next seven generations, and for seven generations beyond that, ad infinitum.

The Law of Unintended Consequences

One of physic’s basic tenets states that every action produces a reaction. It’s a natural law that applies to politics, economics, and many other endeavors, as well; it does not adhere exclusively to physics.

When an action is a known quantity, the reaction it produces is predictable. However, when actions are unknown quantities (as in things that have never been tried before), the reactions often manifest as unintended consequences. Sometimes, actions are so intense that they touch off a chain-reaction of events in which each event produces its own set of unintended consequences. Like a handful of stones cast into a pond, major events cause overlapping ripples that radiate outward, seemingly forever.

Take the invention of the steam engine, for instance. When James Watt patented his design for the first practical steam engine in 1769, he ushered in the Industrial Age, which led to the Machine Age, which in turn gave rise to the Automobile Age. I’m not sure if there’s enough room on the entire Internet to list all of the adverse reactions (unintended consequences) attributable to the automobile’s invention; they are legion.

From the way we build our communities and structure our lifestyles to global warming and war in the Middle East, cars play a pivotal role in shaping and defining our society. Cars brought us more freedom, greater independence, unprecedented prestige, and never-before-known convenience in quantities that guaranteed their ubiquity. Cars brought us closer to everything, even as they made everything unsustainable.

Because of the automobile, people left family farms in droves to begin new lives in cities and suburbs. The popular abandonment of the nation’s farms fueled the proliferation of factory farms and the ongoing expansion of suburban sprawl.

Suburban sprawl gobbles up prime farmland, and the monocrop agriculture practiced by factory farms destroys the environment in numerous ways, not the least of which is widespread pollution caused by farm chemicals—insecticides, pesticides, herbicides, artificial fertilizers, growth hormones, and antibiotics.

Are these end results? Not hardly! They’re only early results that paved the way for more serious consequences that have already befallen us and for others that lie in wait for us in the not-too-distant future.

Our attachment to cars made us lazy and fat and dependent on foreign oil. Cars gave us easier access to medical care, even as they increased our need for medical care. They gave us strip malls and parking lots, rush hours and traffic jams, fast food and drive-in everything.

Despite the rising costs of owning, driving and maintaining automobiles, despite worsening pollution and global warming, despite rising gasoline prices and exorbitant insurance rates, and despite the frustrations of traffic congestion, people are reluctant to give up their cars. Their obsession with cars blinds them to reality while allowing them to maintain an illusion of well being.

Car-addicted people aren’t about to change their ways. At a time when car addicts should be thinking about curbing their addiction and looking at sustainable options, they are, in fact, demanding bigger, heavier, more powerful and less fuel efficient cars in greater numbers than ever before.

Of course, more cars need bigger, better streets and highways, which always seem to invite more cars. Maybe we should just pave America, paint some lines, and call it a day.

Military Responds to Emergencies—Sometimes

On October 25th, 1999, the day that golfer Payne Stewart died, the U.S. Air Force and the Air National Guard were ready. When air traffic controllers lost radio contact with Stewart’s Learjet 35 only 25 minutes after take-off from Orlando, a pair of F-16s—flying a routine training mission out of Tyndall AFB—gave chase, but didn’t catch it. An F-15 fighter, flying out of Eglin AFB, took up pursuit of the wayward Lear, keeping it in sight for 25 minutes before diverting to St. Louis for fuel.

A few minutes later, four Air National Guard F-16s and a KC-135 refueling tanker, out of Tulsa, took over the chase, but barely got within 100 miles of the ill-fated Learjet before handing off to two Air National Guard F-16’s from Fargo, N.D., which kept the doomed aircraft in sight until it ran out of fuel and hit the ground.

The point I’m trying to make here is that when a single small commuter aircraft carrying six people goes off-track, the military responds (appropriately) by deploying no less than 10 aircraft of its own, but when four commercial passenger aircraft carrying scores of people are hijacked by terrorists, the military can’t seem to find its ass with both hands.

It just seems terribly convenient that on the day that terrorists decide to strike, military jets and fighter pilots on the eastern seaboard are engaged in training exercises. But, then, I guess training for an emergency is easier than actually dealing with one.

Does this lack of military response on 9/11 prove conspiracy theory? Naw, it only hints at one. It’s just another piece of the puzzle.

Multitasking Madness

Over the last 10 or 15 years, multitasking has become the darling buzzword of the corporate hire-archy (I know, but it’s an intentional misspelling). Don’t even think about applying for a job in a corporate setting unless you have excellent multitasking skills.

What are multitasking skills? Essentially, they’re the abilities to do several things at the same time while maintaining the illusion of competence.

Employers that hire on the basis of multitasking skills are delusional. While they imagine they’re getting an employee that can churn out a project in 1/3 of the time, or work on three projects at once, what they’re really getting is someone who can turn a relatively easy project into total chaos or screw up three projects simultaneously.

To be an effective multitasker, one must be able to focus on two or more thoughts at the same time. Also, the left hand must know what the right hand is doing at all times. That’s why I never became a juggler or a pianist; both of these activities require advanced multitasking skills. Picture me as a juggler: Apple, bowling ball, chain saw; apple, bowling ball, chain saw; apple, chain saw, bowl . . . oops! There goes my arm. As a concert pianist, I’d be equally inept, what with my left hand playing Swan Lake and my right hand playing Chopsticks.

Do I multitask? Of course I do. I can walk and chew gum at the same time. I can smoke a joint and watch TV at the same time. I can drink coffee and think about what to write next at the same time.

And that, my friends, pretty much defines the limits of my multitasking skills. Any additional effort on my part requires additional pay.