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Aug. 30th, 2010 11:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stormdogI was just talking to a coworker about why I like my vintage desk fan. Personal responsibility.
My vintage desk fan, with it's hard metal blades just waiting to sting someone thoughtless enough (like me) to stick them into it, is like a domesticated animal. Generally it's safe, but if you do something stupid around it, it could easily hurt you. In the hardware world, that possibility has been legislated as close to out of existence as possible. Fan guards with no room for fingertips.
And there's a hell of a lot to be said for that. Stoves that have safety systems that won't let gas run into a room and blow up are a good thing. Tickets for people who have children in cars without a car seat or seatbelts are a good thing. Safety from dangers that are not immediately obvious, or that you are put in by other people without your choice or understanding are not cool.
But it can be overdone. It's worst for animals. I believe that the vast majority of the time a human is hurt by an animal, the human did something stupid and is firmly at fault. an equally vast majority of the time, a similar majority of humans put the blame on an animal who is only reacting to stimulus in accordance with it's instincts. You can't legislate the construction and design of animals to make them safer, so animals are treated as though they're ticking time bombs, lying in wait for a chance to lash out at some unsuspecting human. It's that sort of reaction that leads to breed specific legislation against Pitbulls, or laws requiring people who are old enough to make their own decisions to wear motorcycle helmets. (In my opinion, we should all have the freedom to be as mind-numbingly stupid as we wish as long as we're not hurting anyone else, and motorcycle helmets are included in that category. Idiocy should not be legislated around.)
When I stick body parts into a spinning fan and end up with a cut and bloodied finger, it's my own damn fault and I accept that. On the whole, I would not trade my modern world with its modern conveniences and overly softened and padded corners for the difficult world of the past. But my desk fan is a link to a sense of personal responsibility that, it seems to me, was probably a lot more common fifty or a hundred years ago. That's one thing that I wish had followed us into the future. It seems like so much of the time these days, the first thing that someone who gets hurt wants to do is find someone else to blame for it.
My vintage desk fan, with it's hard metal blades just waiting to sting someone thoughtless enough (like me) to stick them into it, is like a domesticated animal. Generally it's safe, but if you do something stupid around it, it could easily hurt you. In the hardware world, that possibility has been legislated as close to out of existence as possible. Fan guards with no room for fingertips.
And there's a hell of a lot to be said for that. Stoves that have safety systems that won't let gas run into a room and blow up are a good thing. Tickets for people who have children in cars without a car seat or seatbelts are a good thing. Safety from dangers that are not immediately obvious, or that you are put in by other people without your choice or understanding are not cool.
But it can be overdone. It's worst for animals. I believe that the vast majority of the time a human is hurt by an animal, the human did something stupid and is firmly at fault. an equally vast majority of the time, a similar majority of humans put the blame on an animal who is only reacting to stimulus in accordance with it's instincts. You can't legislate the construction and design of animals to make them safer, so animals are treated as though they're ticking time bombs, lying in wait for a chance to lash out at some unsuspecting human. It's that sort of reaction that leads to breed specific legislation against Pitbulls, or laws requiring people who are old enough to make their own decisions to wear motorcycle helmets. (In my opinion, we should all have the freedom to be as mind-numbingly stupid as we wish as long as we're not hurting anyone else, and motorcycle helmets are included in that category. Idiocy should not be legislated around.)
When I stick body parts into a spinning fan and end up with a cut and bloodied finger, it's my own damn fault and I accept that. On the whole, I would not trade my modern world with its modern conveniences and overly softened and padded corners for the difficult world of the past. But my desk fan is a link to a sense of personal responsibility that, it seems to me, was probably a lot more common fifty or a hundred years ago. That's one thing that I wish had followed us into the future. It seems like so much of the time these days, the first thing that someone who gets hurt wants to do is find someone else to blame for it.
