Oftentimes, I sit back and wonder what the world is coming to.  Not necessarily from an “it’s all going to end” standpoint, but rather a “the more information that we have and the laws that we make” perspective.  Let me point out some examples grabbed from recent headlines.

Ok…airport scanners.  Full body airport scanners.  Shades of the movie “Total Recall” come to mind.  If you want to have some fun peel a big potato and put it in your pants.   But seriously, folks.  All it took was a lunatic with his underwear full of explosives.  I understand the need for airline security, and the scanners do not bother me.  It’s not like all the security people are going to be huddled around it looking at an x-ray of everyone.  The funny thing is that Isreal, a country that has a daily legitimate terrorist threat, has no plans to implement these machines in their airports.

It’s time for a little bit of history.  An Isreali airline has not been hijacked since 1972.  Since then, no attempts have been made.  You have to wonder why…and here is where we get a little politically incorrect.  Isreal is always under fire for racially profiling Arabs.  Sometimes it is justified, other times it is not.  Isreal has no issues singling out Arabs for extra scrutiny prior to boarding a plane (ironically, the hijacking in 1972 was by the Japanese Red Army).  They look at people, as much as the baggage.  People who are nervous, or uptight.  The security is very tight, and not often visible.  Over here, in Canada and the United States, were are trying to use technology to compensate for the fact that we do not wish to eyeball certain races a little more carefully than others.  Now – how to you not justify inconveniencing certain ethnic groups when it comes to saving lives?  To do otherwise in my humble opinion is downright foolish.

Speaking of airlines, Air Canada has been directed to offer “peanut-free zones” by the Canadian Transportation Agency, as people who have peanut-related allergies are now considered disabled.  In as much as I have sympathy for someone who has nut allergy, methinks that this is going a bit too far.  Does that mean that obese people are disabled too, and should be given two seats (for the price of one)?  Of course not – which means that the person sitting beside the abnormally large human is inconvenienced and uncomfortable throughout the entire flight.  What if two fat people somehow have side-by-side seats?  I can see where this is going.  In fifty years the airplane will be broken up into all these little sections for individuals with special needs, leaving no room for the people who do not have any problems.

Speaking of peanut allergies, when did these come to pass?  I don’t ever remember notifications of peanut zones when I was a child.  Eating peanuts in school was commonplace, and nobody had anaphylaxis or required an emergency injection of epinephrine.  I really think that the peanut allergies have been severely exaggerated by way of all the media sensationalism.  I have an allergy to Lysol.  It is not something that kills me when I breathe the air in which it has been sprayed, but my eyes water and my nose runs – both of which cause me discomfort.  Does that mean that when I fly I should insist on a Lysol-free zone in the airplane?  Of course not!  Maybe I’m being a little insensitive, but I have never been much of a fan of multiple special interest groups all looking out for their own narrow interests.

Up next is the story of a teenager in London Ontario who made a homemade bomb.  The story is sad.  He did not want to harm anyone but himself, and thankfully it was stopped before he managed to do himself any harm.  It took police a number of hours to deactivate the bomb, and for safety reasons they had to evacuate thirty homes.  The police chief is placing the blame on the Internet.

This is what bothers me.  If there was no Internet do you think that would have stopped the kid from trying to kill himself?  No!  He would have used a gun, or maybe he would have hung himself.  Using that same logic, does that mean that we can blame the Library of Congress because Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons and enriching uranium (It was in the library that Saddam’s scientists researched and copied (legally) the plans to build a calutron)?  If you want to blame someone (and I do not believe in this case there should be any blame spread around), look at the people around him.  Friends, teachers, family…nobody noticed anything strange?

Regardless, placing blame is something we as a society seem to do very well.  Everyone always wants to place the blame for any problem or situation on someone else.  It reminds me of a quotation out of the movie Rising Sun, a movie where Sean Connery plays John Connor, a world weary ex-cop deeply entrenched in Japanese culture.  The quote is “The Japanese have a saying, “Fix the problem, not the blame.  Find out what’s fucked up and fix it.”  Nobody gets blamed.  We’re always after who fucked up. Their way is better.”  Management 101 – It’s a very simple concept that is all too often not applied.