Stuff That Baffles Me

Every morning as I shower and brush my teeth, I watch/listen to the cheerful, well-coiffed network newscasters as they present what passes for news these days. This morning, wedged between reports of the latest celebrity marriage and the reasons why diets fail, my network of choice presented an in depth interview with a "courageous" young man—a "hero" no less—who had to cut off his own arm because he reached into his furnace to retrieve a tool, and he couldn’t pull the arm out again through the louvers.

Actually, he only partially cut it off. After three days of sawing and gnawing, a coworker came by to check up on him and called the fire department. The guy survived, the arm did not.

Not once during this gushing report (pardon the pun) did anyone state the obvious: That you've got to be a special breed of idiot to stick your arm through louvers and get it stuck. I don't mean to pile on here, but are you kidding me?

During his interview, the victim confided to the news guy that he realized that he needed to take the drastic step of self-amputation when he thought about his family. His mother and father were coming to visit him, and he didn't want them to find him that way. The news played it as altruism; I think it was humiliation. Who would want their parents to think they were that stupid?

I'm being harsh here because there's a point to be made. We need to start calling stupid stupid, and we need to stop making excuses for people who make ridiculous choices in their lives.

Take, for example, a safety guy I know who routinely brags to anyone who will listen that he gets his prized exotic sports car up to 150 miles an hour as often as he can on under-populated "back roads." That's 220 feet per second. Assuming perfect reflexes, he will travel 330 feet—more than the length of a football field—in the time it takes him to recognize a hazard (say, a deer in the road, or a child) and move his foot from the gas to the break. No one would survive that accident. Or if they did, they'd likely wish they hadn't.

What level of hubris—what kind of total disregard for others—would make someone think he has the right to put the rest of the community in danger so that he can play with his mega-horsepower toy? I don't get it.

Coincidentally, this safety guy has problems getting management and employees to buy into the safety program. Gee, I wonder if there's a correlation.

While we're on the topic of stupidity, let's talk about motorcycle helmets. (Actually, we could discuss motorcycles themselves, but I fear this column is already alienating enough people as it is.) A friend of mine opposes laws requiring motorcycle helmets because he thinks they dilute the gene pool by giving people who are otherwise too stupid to live an artificial extension on life.

Come on, think about it. A moving vehicle, a shock-sensitive brain, and a world populated almost exclusively with stuff that is harder than your skull. Can you think of anything that might go wrong?

Look, I'm as moved by human tragedy as the next guy, but outside a victim's circle of family and friends, doesn't there come a point when self-inflicted tragedy is just plain sinful? Doesn't there come a point where it's okay to show anger when people show such disregard to those who love them and depend upon them for companionship and support and income?

I think I'm there. And I think you should be there with me.

While I'm calling things as I see them, let me close with how disappointed I was—no, how embarrassed I was—for this industry and our members when seats for the safety general session at ISRI's San Diego Convention were seventy percent vacant. The economic session was full. The international politics session (Condoleezza Rice) was packed.

The safety session was virtually empty, despite the fact that the speaker was one of the best known, most dynamic speakers in the field. He had lots to offer.

But apparently, as an industry, we weren't interested in listening. I can't help but wonder if that demonstrated lack of interest has anything to do with the scrap industry's embarrassingly high injury and fatality rates.

I've written in this space before that there's a perfect storm of regulation, legislation and enforcement headed our way. If the storm arrives—when it arrives—it will likely have something to do with the rain dance we've been doing for decades.

As in all things, actions speak louder than platitudes, and the time is here when we just plain need to start doing the right thing—if not for ourselves, then for everybody else.

—John Gilstrap
ISRI Director of Safety