Don’t Break My Electronic Bubble
A study originally published by the journal Injury Prevention is “big news” on the TV and internet today. It’s a report about the increase in deaths and injuries caused by walking around with headphones on. Really? This is big news? Did we really need a study for this?
Any one who’s walked though a crowed mall, or train platform and has been run into by a headphone wearing menace could have come to the common sense conclusion that walking around with headphones on is dangerous. What I find interesting and sad is to observe just how socially isolated the electronically connected are. Whenever you put headphones on or take out your phone and begin texting or talking in public, you put up an invisible barrier of personal space. You send the message that the people around you are not worth your effort to notice them. They cease to exist in your electronic bubble until you are forced to interact to complete your business or until you bump into them. Once while at the mall, I was run into by a teenage girl, texting away with her face in her phone, who seemed genuinely shocked that an actual person was impeding her forward motion. I have seen families sitting around the table at a restaurant texting to people miles away while ignoring those three feet from them.
I am amazed that I have to remind my kids that leaving your headphones on, texting or typing while someone is talking to you is just plain rude. I thought maybe it was just teenage disrespect, but they behave the same way around their friends, and their friends do the same. It seems we are losing the ability to verbally communicate in person. The manners necessary for personal interactions also disappearing. I think that this lack of civility is as much a loss as that of personal safety.
Blood On Their Hands
The unofficial military mission statement of “doing more with less”, the Secretaries of Defense that pushed it and the commanders who bought into it all share the blame. The dream of a “Lean Mean Fighting Machine” would only be possible if the military were staffed with robots, but it is not. It is staffed with men and women who think, feel, love and fear. Who have families and lives back home. It is their humanity that makes them vulnerable to the horrors of war, but it is also their humanity that gives them a reason to preserve the dream of liberty anywhere in the world. It gives them the courage to willingly accept that the cost of freedom could be their very lives. This courage should not be taken for granted. Every military doctor who has proclaimed a troop “fit for combat” when he should have been sent home, every commander who has proclaimed his unit ready when deep down he knew they weren’t, shares in the guilt. Every officer who has ever put his career ahead of his troops, every military leader who lacked the courage to tell his superiors the truth, that his unit was undermanned and stretched to the breaking point, shares the guilt. Every Secretary of Defense who failed to make unpopular decisions on how to increase manning, every Commander-in-Chief who was told what he wanted to hear and bought it, shares the guilt.
After all the investigations, reports and hearings, are concluded and “band-aid” recommendations are put in place we will still be left with a military that is undermanned and weary. We ask our military men and women to carry an unimaginable burden. Our military leadership owes the Afghanis and Sgt Bales’ family, who is now left without a husband and father, more than an apology. They are owed and honest assessment of what went wrong, and real solutions to prevent it from happening again. Until the people at the Pentagon find a way to bring more men and women in and retain the well-trained troops already in place, the stress of repeated deployments will create more Sgt Bales’.
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