Some
warning signs are humorous, like the one by the hotel room iron: “Do not iron
clothes while wearing” (c’mon guys, don’t tell me you haven’t been tempted!).
Or the label on the can of pepper spray: “May irritate
eyes.” This Halloween, I was a warning sign of a sort. I sprayed and tinted my
hair into flames, painted my face as a globe with melting icecaps and vast
hurricanes, carried around a book with pictures of Katrina called “If I Did
It.” I wasn’t going for funny – more like “scariest”, or “most original”. But most
observers were bewildered. One guessed, “Explosion in a Paint Factory?”
Not all
warning signs, no matter how expressed, are so clear or so compelling as to change
our behavior. Think about it. Our cerebral circuitry for detecting danger
evolved when the hazards were obvious, like the large predator threatening to
drag away our toddler, or another acorn moon with no acorns to harvest. Today,
the dangers are mostly of human origin, and they are complex, and growing in
number. Often, they are disguised. Consider Aqua Dots, the must-have kids toy which, thanks to an ingredient substitution by a
greedy subcontractor, came coated with GHB, the date rape drug. Didn’t see that
one coming!
Then there’s
the tragedy of the Cosco Busan,
the China-bound freighter which spilled its oily guts into
Complex and
hidden threats require more sophisticated detection systems. They require the
ability to sift through mountains of input, to separate the significant
messages from the noise, to recognize patterns. When you put your ear to the
global danger-scope, it’s nothing if not noisy. The internet, as valuable a source
of info as it is, is an ocean of noise, where anyone can publish anything about
everything. Even the newspaper might be called the “noisepaper”,
for the choice and placement of the stories. Occasionally one can discern the bigger
picture, like the day the PD had front-of-section photographs of the carbon-colored
waters of the Bay and carbon-tinted skies above
Too often,
however, the news we need to know is buried. I was wrapping my harvest of green
tomatoes in sheets of newspaper pulled from the recycle bin when a headline
caught my eye: “U.N. Scientists detail mounting climate risks”. It was the
final report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the scientific
group that recently shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. “Synthesizing
reams of data from its previous three reports, the IGCC for the first time
specifically points out important risks that had been buried in technical data:
melting of ice sheets that could lead to a rapid rise in sea levels; the
extinction of large numbers of species brought about by even moderate amounts
of warming, on the order of 1 to 3 degrees.” Front page? No, that was reserved
for Barry Bonds and an update on the convenience store murder. The imminent destruction
of the earth earned a spot on A-13.
Are we
irretrievably losing perspective on what’s important? Are we lost in the fog of
corporate propaganda and Rapture prophecy? In one of my all-time favorite movie
scenes, Indiana Jones is racing down a hill, a whole tribe of head hunters on
his heels. Indy calls out to his pontoon plane pilot to start the engines, but
the pilot hesitates – after all, he’s got a big fish on the line! But it
doesn’t take long for the pilot to get his priorities straight, and Indy
survives to finish the film and at least 2 sequels.
I hope we
do too.