You know those electronic signs they have on the freeways now that flash up Code Adams or tell you the wait time for getting to specific destinations? Well, lately, along the 22 and 405, when there is nothing better to flash up on the electronic signs, they say:
And every time I see that message it reminds me of another issue I’ve been going over in my brain regarding healthcare and how to get people to lead healthier lives. I’ve been going off of a very specific example and analyzing why it bothers me so much and in this message on the freeway signs, I have found at least part of my answer. Let me give you a brief rundown of the healthcare issue I’m referring to. A particular public health school of thought supports the use of monetary incentive to induce people to lead healthier lives. For example, excess consumption of soda has been linked to increased risk of type 2 diabetes. The thought, then, is that if we place a tax on soda, people will be less inclined to purchase (and thus consume) as much soda. Furthermore, the tax money could be used to educate people about why soda is bad for your health. The resulting decrease in life-style induced type 2 diabetes, extrapolated, would allow medical resources (which – despite the heroic argument circulating around the country these days – remain limited) to be used toward unpreventable diseases. Now, I am all for a redistribution of how healthcare funds are spent, trust me! But this tax idea really irks me, and it’s not even primarily because taxes in general irk me. I have determined that it is all in keeping with my views on this electronic freeway sign message and how upstanding societies are built – a strain of ideas I have coined the It’s Not Worth It Advisory Freeway Sign Philosophy. (You heard it here first.)
I’ll start by saying (as you’ve probably already surmised) that I abhor these signs; they make me cringe every time I pass by them, which is about a hundred times a week. Not because they call it a “handheld cell,” which is vaguely redundant and cannot be attributed to common usage and which, worst of all, misrepresents the word “handheld” as meaning “something that you are, at this exact moment, holding in your hand.” And not because it so kindly informs me, without really giving me any useful information, how much I will be charged when my civil liberties to use my own damn cell phone on my own damn time are shamelessly inhibited by superfluous laws. (Not useful because, let’s face it, all it really leaves me wondering is under what circumstances will my fine actually be on the + side of $159.) The reason these particular signs really excite my gag reflex is because of the fabulously condescending third line: IT’S NOT WORTH IT.
Now call me paranoid, but when a random sign who doesn’t know my little silver Mazda from the random silver Mazda two cars away, much less me from the other random Mazda driver, on a random freeway tells me that something is or is not worth my doing, it necessarily makes me mildly suspicious. The reason being, of course, that besides the fact that the sign is inanimate and thus can’t actually formulate its own advice, it also fails to take into consideration the thirteen million different things that may be going on in my life that would make a handheld cell ticket of $159+ worth it to me. I know, in this country, we are very eager to join everyone into one beautiful and disgustingly unvaried mass of “color blind,” “non-sexist,” socioeconomically “equal” sheep, but let me suggest that we are all, in fact, very different. If you will – at least momentarily – accept this premise, then it is possible to suppose all sorts of situations in which the ticket would indeed be worth it to a given individual. What if I am a pregnant millionaire about to go to into labor and I couldn’t get in touch with a single person I know before I left the house? My water has broken and I am driving myself to the hospital because I know it will be quicker than waiting for the ambulance to get there and because, more importantly, my 89 year old grandfather is dying of lung cancer at the very same hospital toward which I am headed. What is $159+ really worth to me then? What if my friend of 25 years is suicidal and I am attempting to talk her out of jumping off of a high-rise building while simultaneously driving to her house to see if I can bodily save her life myself? What if it’s something smaller? What if I am on the phone with the love of my life and my best friend after an exhaustingly depressing week and it is the first time I have laughed the entire day? To hell with drinking on a Thursday night, I’ll spend my hundred bucks talking on the phone on my way home from work. What if I am some delusional, transcendental idealist with some ridiculous ideas of nonconformity and I want to disobey the law and I want to be pulled over so that people will understand the plight of the politically oppressed? Don’t tell me, oh-ye-sign-of-great-presumption that you know what $159+ and a cell phone conversation are worth to me!
Okay so it’s not the sign I’m mad at. It’s the bureaucratic force that decided it would be a good idea to look down from a high seat of grandiose power on the peon citizens who pay their paychecks and imply to all the supposedly adult and responsible people (responsible enough, anyway, to be given driver’s licenses) that they are school children who need to be instructed on how to make judgments for their own lives. Instead of informing me that there will be a fine for breaking the law and then having the decency to allow me to weigh my risks and benefits in this regard, they instead instruct me – in what they pretend is a sort of witty and helpful commentary – to follow their rules for my own benefit. (Instead of informing me that excessive soda consumption causes increased risk of diabetes, they force upon me what they pretend is a generous and helpful incentive, to follow their rules for my own benefit.)
What if instead, they treated me like an intelligent, reasoning being? (Now, I know it’s a big step to attach those characteristics to human beings as a whole, but if we don’t use that assumption, then it follows that they are just as akin to chimpanzees as I, and thus we are still on equal footing). What if they told me straight, “Hey, Roya, we don’t give a rat’s ass that you think this law is unconscionable. It’s a law and if you break it, we are going to delight in pulling you over and we probably won’t even help you scrape out the spare change from under your car mats to pay the $159+ that you now owe the state.”? (What if they told me, straight, “Hey, Roya, we don’t care that you love soda so much that you can’t pull your fat ass together enough to refrain from drinking it at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And we don’t care that you now have diabetes. We’re not paying for you to get fixed, because, frankly, there are people who deserve medical care more than you do.”?) Is it possible, that if we as a society, made the assumption that people were going to be responsible for doing the right things for their own selves, instead of being connived into doing what we as a collective think is best for them as a collective, is it possible that people would then find it necessary to actually take responsibility for themselves? We all complain about dumbing down American schools. Why are the schools being dumbed down? Because we don’t want to tell the kid who doesn’t learn math as quickly as the Einstein sitting next to him, “I’m sorry life is harder for you kid, but suck it up, embrace who you are, work your ass off, and be a good person anyway.” We don’t want him to feel this vast unfairness. So we take care of him for him. We say, okay, you only have to know as much as the dumbest kid here. But who are we really crutching? As always, the people who are going to take advantage of the system. The ones who would be amazing and brilliant if they took responsibility can now slide by on nothing and populate our world with dopes. Because that’s all we expected of them.
What bothers me is this idea that people who have more knowledge or power in a particular aspect of life are so quick to insult the intelligence of the people who, for many different reasons, lack that same knowledge or power. But that is not what knowledge and power are all about. People who we put in charge of our government – people who have the education to be our healthcare leaders – should not be persuading us to believe certain things. Rather, I argue, their job – if they are indeed public servants – is to help bridge the gap between the vast amount of knowledge they have acquired from devoting their lives to a certain subject and the understanding of those of us who have devoted our lives to other subjects. Thus allowing us to place as much trust in them as our own intelligent and rational brains suggest that we do; thus acknowledging that the difference between us is not intellect versus stupidity, or superiority versus inferiority, but rather expertise versus novice. And I really think if we can make that distinction, citizens will become more involved in their own lives because they will realize that society and community are not sociological concepts that ebb and flow around them, as though disjointed from their opinions and actions, but rather that they themselves are society and community and they must make it what they will (dumbasses driving people off the road, life-style induced diabetics, or healthy, resilient, considerate individuals).
Will there be casualties? Most definitely. Will there be innocent casualties. Unfortunately, but inevitably, yes. But at some point we have to recognize that a society that artificially crutches people’s weaknesses in order to “protect” them nurtures individuals who become too lazy, apathetic, and irrational to make their own responsible decisions. And in that society, the number of casualties - innocent and otherwise - will be vastly greater.
-R.E.A.
