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.

Which One is Different?

Take a look at these photographs, all taken along the same stretch of railroad, between Canyon Country and Acton, California. One of them is different from all the others. Can you tell which one is unlike all the rest?

Did you guess that photograph No. 3 is the different one? 

Yes! Photograph No. 3 shows a railroad crossing so dangerous that residents of the neighborhood it has served for almost a century are no longer allowed to cross there.

The others are okay.

I say this tongue in cheek. There has not been a single crossing accident at site No. 3 except for a woman on foot who tried to stop a freight train fifty years ago. You may have found it confusing that all the crossings are at-grade, and are regulated by stop signs. You may have been confused that one of the crossings boasts two tracks, or that some are paved and some are not; but the different one, the dangerous one, the one that fits with the unacknowledged schemes of our public officials, is ours.

        Did you notice that it is no more dangerous than the other crossings?

Actually, Federal studies of railroad crossings have found that the chance of an accident at crossings such as these is insignificant. The real crossing danger occurs at industrial sites.

In the process of "looking out for us," railroad officials created a barrier against our access to the world, which did not please us, but certainly pleased some other people who were simultaneously receiving a piece of land from Los Angeles County at our only other access point.

It will be interesting to discover just how our properties will enrich a bunch of people who don’t need to be any richer. We do not have a problem with them enriching themselves on the many hundreds of acres that have lain unoccupied for generations, but there is something about our living here, our being able to have legal access to the world, our being able to build on our own property, our being able to sell our property for what it is worth, that just gets under the skin of those acquisitive individuals.

The railroad, by the way, is intimately connected to Los Angeles County. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors sits on the Metrolink board as well.

But what do the railroad guys get out of this? What do the Supervisors get out of this? What sort of person can face himself and his family when he selectively isolates one neighborhood and lets the others go, just because that one neighborhood is vulnerable to the bullying of public officials? How does that happen, that an entire organization is silenced?

Meantime, other public officials and other powerful members of our larger community stand by, just like the teachers and administrators who stand by and permit bullying on the playgrounds and in the halls of their schools. If you hate bullying, here is a classic example. If you are not powerful enough to intervene you can at least express your disapproval by spreading the word about this blog and our issue. Many already have and we do thank you for your moral support and assistance.

Wouldn’t it be cool if just one big railroad official, just one, stood up and said “Wait, this is wrong, and I am not going to compromise my own ethics to enrich some other guy.”?

We need your help to reach that one person.

BIWT

“Because I wanted to.”

In my family, that is one of the most common answers to the question:

“Why did you do that?”

“Because I wanted to.”

Here we are, legally landlocked. Our little neighborhood is cut off through the actions of the very people you’d expect to be devoted to preserving our lives, not ruining them. Why have the Southern California Regional Rail Authority, California Department of Fish and Game, and Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy blocked our community’s legal access to the world, while our own Los Angeles County Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich stands by pronouncing that there is nothing he can do? They are not telling—not in a believable way. But we know.

Why are the people who run Metrolink, Fish and Game, and the conservancy working together to render our property worthless?

Because they want to.

The explanation that my own two little girls have given me over the years, and sometimes even my own grown up wife—“Because I wanted to”—really says it all. My girls’ explanation is a non-explanation, but is really the only true one. “Because I wanted to,” augmented by an examination into just what she gets out of her actions, tells more than she wants to admit. It tells that her bottom-line motivation is selfishness.

And don’t give me that hogwash that every action is at bottom selfish, or that we do good just to make our own selves feel good. That may be—very trivially—true; but there is such a thing as good and evil. You know it, I know it, my girls know it, even Michael Antonovich, the SCRRA, Fish and Game—and even Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy knows it!

It’s just that they calculate to gain more out of selfishness than they stand to lose feeling crappy about themselves. We don’t know what they calculate to gain. They won’t say, but it must be of more value to them than right action.

Personally I hope I am a healthier human being than that. And I imagine that I am in that regard much closer to average than public officials are. The degree of crappy I would feel for ruining the property values of a dozen families is much greater than almost any monetary gain.

Do you wonder where you stand between selfish gain and right action? Aren't you just a little tempted to dash off an email or note to Michael Antonovich or your favorite legislator or the newspaper, or us?

There is another non-explanation for dirty behavior: “Because I can.”

Who says, “Because I can”? A wise-ass. Someone with no regard for the feelings of others and the consequences of his actions, right?

Why would Metrolink close our railroad crossing and leave others open? Why would Fish and Game allow culverts all along the Santa Clara River, and even assist a movie company to install one near our old crossing, but prohibit us from crossing? Why would Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy quietly acquire property at the end of our only other access route and refuse us an easement through it? Why?

Because they can.