One Angry Monkey

As I get older I find I’m getting crankier. I wouldn’t have even thought that possible but there you go. That’s not the first time I’ve been wrong but it’s one of the only times I’ve ever admitted it. The problem is that I seem to be losing my once healthy apathy. There were things which would have pissed me off just as much when I was younger, if I’d only cared. Now I’m finding that I care.

That’s not to say that I’m about to go throwing myself down in front of bulldozers (thank you Douglas Adams). But things are making me irate enough to yell at the TV. Why would I yell at the TV like your average garden variety crazy person? Well isn’t it good of you to ask. Government “authorised” ads. It should be illegal for governments to have a say in what goes on TV.

The one I’m finding objectionable is the campaign currently being run on road injuries. Having been in two accidents, one in which I was a passenger, one in which I was a driver, I was fairly fortunate in both instances to have only suffered a little whiplash and a seatbelt bruise that Sulfurous Winds from Below insisted resembled a hickey. Avoiding serious injury was not through any particular talent on my part (although I would normally imply that it had been), it was sheer dumb luck. Plus my father’s inability to resist the urge to tell me how careful I had to be on the gravel road in the forest park up the road from us. Always be ready to stop, always be careful not to go off into the ditch because the water table up there will bog you in before you know it and you’ll never get out again and you know that you don’t want to be walking to the DoC headquarters which is the only place with a phone up there. You get the idea.

So I managed to stop. The other driver, a teenager down from Auckland for the weekend, who had never experienced the reduced traction of a gravel road didn’t. It could have been worse. Instead of bumps and bruises I could have been sent off a cliff into the river. There were plenty of places on that road where that possibility existed. That would certainly have at least led to serious injury.

So that being said, what category do you suppose I would have fallen under? “He was in a hurry”? “He dozed off”? “She was texting”? “He was speeding”? “He was wasted”? We know it wasn’t “She had no seatbelt”, I already mentioned the bruise.

What I find objectionable isn’t so much that the ads exist, or that they’re cutting into my valuable program time. What I don’t like is the implication that anyone seriously injured in a road accident has only themselves to blame. How about “She was an innocent bystander”? Or “He was in the wrong place at the wrong time”? Or if we absolutely have to blame someone, “She was plowed over by a drunk driver”?

To hell with fear, it’s clearly not working. Bring on the guilt!

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 2nd, 2007 at 2:24 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.