Balls

Every Tuesday night I sit down with a cluster of pill bottles and parse out my daily meds into a plastic box featuring seven lids labeled with the initials of the days of the week raised on top.

When I attempt to pour one pill at a time into each little cubicle, all too often out come tumbling two, sometimes three. Skilled as I am, after all these years, at dispensing pills, I just do not have enough control at it—and that is not because I am uncoordinated. Each pill bottle has a shoulder at the top, from which rises the drum-shaped, threaded outlet. The pills jam up inside the shoulder and will come out only when I gently shake the container; and sometimes I shake just a tad too hard for the pile-up to release a single tablet.

You know all of this. The same thing might happen to you. But here is my point:

When the industrial designer, all proud of herself and imagining herself to be so superior to all of us because she could design things and we could not—when she, I say, sculpted the pill bottle for the first time, then cast the prototype all lah-de-dah and full of herself, she was not thinking about what it would be like to use that bottle as a consumer. She was just “doing her job.”

Someone who does think about what it feels like to pour medications from a bottle, me for instance, would design the inside of a pill bottle with one side—at least—ramping up from inside the body of the container to the outlet. No shoulder. The ramp would also narrow as it approached the top, so that a single file of tablets would line up. Such a dispenser would allow one to tip a single pill with control to spare.

Thoughtless designs that ignore the user are everywhere. The windshield wiper lever is so close behind the steering wheel in my truck that when I have to make a sudden move—like driving on our hairpin-infested “back way”—I frequently nick the lever with my little finger and the wipers spring to action smearing back-way dust back and forth in front of me. Thanks moron auto designer who drives his pickup truck only to the mall.

I can lock my cell phone so that I pull it from my pocket without activating a button or swiping the touch screen. But when the phone rings, everything on there comes live and the act of extracting the phone from my shirt pocket now changes several settings in ways that it takes half an hour to figure out and change back. It also hangs up on my caller. Thanks a lot you programmer who thinks you’re so clever to build all that software into our phones with no regard to how they interfere with actually using the damn thing as a phone.

Last example: I spent twenty-five years teaching mathematics to the youth of Los Angeles County, and very proud of it. During that time my colleagues and I survived twenty-five and more “reforms” and improvements to the art of teaching. These reforms were instigated by mayors and captains of industry, ivory tower teachers of teachers and psychologists who sent white mice through mazes, parent groups and school administrators  whose sole teaching experience might be three years as a gym teacher—no foolin’. Never, not once, in all that time, ever, was a teacher consulted. And we teachers had a pretty darn good idea of what was wrong, because we lived it every day.

I have two points, and I believe I have made my first one: the world is full of meddling know-it-alls who have no clue what effect their pet projects are having on the people they supposedly serve. I want to suggest that a Los Angeles County Supervisor, with two million subjects—er, constituents—can be grossly out of touch with lives on the ground in the same way. Like, say, allowing a small community to be land-locked for ten very difficult years.

My second, and more important point, is that these screw-ups can be fixed. It may take more work to fix something than it did to set it up right in the first place, but if it was possible to screw it up, it is also possible to fix it.

But that takes EFFORT. And BALLS.

BALLS. That’s right. I said BALLS.

We applaud the staff of Los Angeles County Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich for having the courage to right the wrong at the railroad crossing, and for shoving his Deputy Norm Hickling out into the lights to face our community. They could not have chosen a better or more graceful ambassador. But now let’s finish this thing, thoroughly and expeditiously.

It will require intelligence, compassion, and BALLS.

Shrewd or Soft-hearted?

Intelligence without Sympathy

A friend tells me that he respects the people who have maneuvered our little neighborhood out of legal access to the world. They are intelligent, he says.

I disagree.

To my way of thinking, an intelligent person is evolved in three primary arenas: head, heart, and guts. To pull off the kind of trick that was sprung on the Briggs Road community, as strong as the perpetrators might be in two of those forms of intelligence, they have to be severely deficient in a third.

They have to have guts, you gotta give them that. This was a gutsy—you might say brazen—thing to do.

Perhaps their second strength is mental. I find that intelligence of the brainy persuasion, especially when coupled with guts but deficient of heart, is more in the category of the shrewd, clever, cunning, or conniving. On Briggs Road our first inclination has been to assume that we are dealing with an intelligence of this nature. Throttling a powerless little neighborhood certainly appears heartless. And how do we persuade someone with lots of brains and little empathy? Well, not by appealing to their sympathy.

My purpose in pointing out the cruelty of cutting off an access that would hurt no one is not to persuade the Southern California Regional Rail Authority, California Fish and Game, Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, or whichever of the conservancies to which Norm Hickling alludes. You see, if in fact their hearts are atrophied, our appeals to their higher feelings just go unnoticed. The Golden Rule is just words to one without compassion. They might care for their own families and tribes, they might even go to church, but they are incapable of following the dictum of the Dalai Lama: Be Kind. Or of Christ: Love thy Neighbor.

No, I am appealing to your ethical capacity. Those of you who have a balanced intelligence will have the brains to understand what is going on, the heart to care, and the courage to do something about it—even if all that you do is post a comment here or urge others to follow this blog.

There is a plethora of historical figures whose deficient sentiment allowed them to perform beastly acts. And many of their acts were beastly—which means not so intelligent after all. The tripod of intelligence requires all three legs. If any one leg is missing, the structure topples. I hope to show in a future post that cutting off the Briggs Road community is ultimately a dumb thing to do, even by the standards of the cunning.

Sentiment without Cognition 

 It is entirely possible, on the other hand, that our fear and inconvenience—and great loss of property value—are the result of the actions of extremely caring people. We do not often consider that, but it could be the case. 

We have daily experience in California of the ill-conceived products of the do-gooders who care so much about us. They erect a traffic light at every intersection where some unfortunate hurried soul might venture into danger. Then, when some mean people run those lights, they install cameras to protect the rest of us. There are so many regulations whose purpose is to thwart unscrupulous businesses that not only those businesses have been chased out of the state, but so also have many of the good ones. And how many entrepreneurs have been discouraged from even starting up?

An actor, who may even be involved in one of the conservancies, has boasted in interviews about building part of his house with soda bottles or some such. True, this keeps those bottles out of landfills, but then so would recycling them. And now those bottles are out of the cycle, and more resources are required to replace them. The net result, when you factor in the better good that might have followed an appeal to recycle, is actually negative.

To have heartfelt concern without a brain can lead one to thoughtlessly callous acts.

Does our fate lie in the hands of thinkers such as these? Is the whole close-access-to-Briggs-Road scheme just a debacle of dumbness?

Well, you decide.

We have heard two explanations for the actions of the State of California conservancies: 

1. A developer was planning to fill the area with houses, and 
2. Wildlife needed a migration corridor. 

            In an earlier post I quote County Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich’s deputy, Norm Hickling, as emailing: “That issue [of development] no longer exists, as the City of Santa Clarita, along with large financial support the County of Los Angeles, purchased the developer’s property.” 

             So forget the threat of wall-to-wall houses. If California persists in turning our homes into bare land, it is not out of kindness.

What about the migration corridor?

Take a look again at our non-copyright-infringing hand-drawn map—which you can verify elsewhere:

The area in which we live is a cul de sac as far as roving animals are concerned. Fleet-footed animals are hemmed in by Soledad Canyon Road and the railroad to the south, and by the California 14 freeway to the north—not by a few isolated houses. These two barriers to animal migration continue in parallel from their western point of intersection in eastern Santa Clarita (not shown) to their eastern point of conjunction east of Acton (not shown). Some animals roam freely in this area, and we do not stop them. But what, we wonder, would migrating animals do? Would they run laps from one end of this “preserve” to the other?

Antelope Valley, so named for its former occupants, is today devoid of those animals because the railroad was built through the middle of the plain and the antelope would not cross the railroad. There are no antelope in our region either. We’ve got the railroad and the freeway.

Could any public official really be so dumb as to imagine that our houses or our dirt road pose the real obstruction to these animals? And if the habitat of a smaller animal is not inhibited by the railroad or the freeway, there is obviously plenty of room for both them and us.

But is there any point to trying to persuade someone who is all heart that theirs is a flawed approach? No matter how carefully thought out, a logical argument makes no sense to some people. I’ve taught math for many years. I know there are people who just cannot think—or, more likely, refuse to make the effort.

We are appealing to your cerebral intelligence. Those of you who have a balanced intelligence will have the brains to understand what is going on, the heart to care, and the courage to do something about it—even if all that you do is post a comment here or urge others to follow this blog.

There are many hundreds of you out there—I see the numbers. But we need our oppressors to see your strength, and a simple comment “I’m on your side!” would serve that purpose.