It’s a Fun, Challenging, Part of Life
by
Eric Peters
EricPetersAutos.com
Risk is fun
– and risk is part of life. Otherwise, we’d never get
out of bed. No, rewind some more. WeÂ’d never leave our motherÂ’s
uterus.
This idea that
risk – note, not recklessness, not irresponsibility
– just “risk” – is something to be stamped out
at all costs is perhaps the most cancerous notion of our era, right
behind egalitarianism and democracy.
Columbus accepted
some risk when he set sail across the ocean sea. It would have been
much safer, I suppose, to stay home. But then weÂ’d not even
know his name – much less celebrate a day in his honor. Those
bold men who strapped themselves into a tiny capsule mounted on
a very large Saturn V rocket and rode it all the way to the Moon
took a risk, too.
Risk is rightly
viewed as synonymous with challenge – which necessarily entails
the possibility of failure. One does not seek it, one is
aware of its possibility. But one accepts the possibility as the
necessary price to be paid in order to meet the challenge. To strive,
to achieve. To be competent rather than complacent. To do –
as opposed to not doing. Risk is the very thing that makes human
progress possible. To refuse to act – or to limit action –
until and unless all risk is removed is to negate the possibility
of acting. It is to embrace stasis – and even that amount to
a false sense of security, since failing to act out of fear of risk
can itself be lethally paralyzing. Think of the prey animal that
freezes rather than bolts at the sight of a predator.
Yet risk-avoidance
has become the cornerstone of the red giant phase American police
state, whose lurid glare we all live under today. Every new authoritarian
measure is proposed – is justified – on the basis of risk-avoidance,
no matter how infinitesimal the risk. Any risk is too much
risk. No price too high, no imposition too extreme. If it makes
us safer. If it reduces some risk.
Recently, for
example, the government issued a ukase that all new cars will
have back-up cameras as standard equipment – even though the
number of children (and others) run over by a backing-up car (more
precisely, an incompetently backed-up car) is too small to even
be described as a fraction of a fraction. During the past ten years,
the government claims about 650 flattened toddlers. A tragedy for
those involved, certainly. But does it constitute a national epidemic
– a risk so great that it justifies forcing every single person
in a nation of 310 million people who wishes to purchase
a new car to also purchase a back-up camera? Do the math. What is
the ratio? The percentage? Let’s call it an even 1,000 –
out of 310 million. Oh, yes. I forget. If it saves even one
life. That is the mantra.
May
14, 2012
Eric Peters
[send him mail] is an automotive
columnist and author of Automotive
Atrocities and Road Hogs (2011). Visit his
website.
Copyright
© 2012 Eric Peters