Putting care on "cruise control"

There is a difference between "care" and "caring".

Today's news illustrates that on several fronts.

In Arizona, an unmanned "drone" aircraft crashed after the pilot, located safely 60 miles away, failed to update his "game console" correctly. ( NTSB cites lax safety controls, Pilot Error in Ariz. Drone Crash, Washington post 10/17/07)

The pilot's computer console locked up, investigators said. He started to transfer control to a backup console used by Customs agents to operate the drone's cameras but did not follow a checklist that required him to make sure the engine controls on the second console matched the ones he had been using.

Because the second console's controls were in the fuel shut-off position, investigators said, the Predator-B's engine quit when control was switched.

The pilot told investigators that he didn't follow the checklist because he was in a hurry, said Pam Sullivan, an NTSB investigator.

Steven R. Chealander, a board member and former Air Force pilot, said that regulators and operators need to ensure that proper procedures are followed in drone operations because pilots may not realize the consequences of their actions if they are not in a cockpit. "You have to change the mind-set from someone operating a computer Game Boy to being the pilot of an aircraft," Chealander said.

I've discussed before the rise in "passive observer" syndrome, almost certainly trained by 1000 hours a year or more on the equivalent to a flight simulator, a "life simulator" (Television) where passive observing is the trained behavior, regardless what is going on around you. Now, with full-life-size TV figures, that has got to be getting even stronger.

The other major behavior training simulator in use today is video games. I'm not sure what the intentions are of the creators, but the impact is desensitization to killing other people or crashing the car/boat/plane one is operating, because all becomes well again by pushing the "reset" button. I tend to believe I pass such drivers - or they pass me - almost every day, as they weave in and out of traffic at high speed. Again, the message for 1000 hours a year is that "it doesn't matter" and "there are no actual consequences of what you do."

And, my regular readers know its about time for my rant on the upcoming "Ice causes pile-up on Interstate X!" headlines. Actual pilots almost never blame "accidents" on "bad weather"-- the NTSB blames "continued operation by the pilot into conditions beyond their skill and experience." "If the ice and snow "causes" crashes, I mean, what can you do? We're helpless in the grip of this outside force! There I was, I hit the brakes, and nothing! It's not my fault! (Of course, I was going 85 mph on icy roads and weaving around all the idiots who were poking along at 30 for some reason ...)" Yeah. Right.

I want to carry over that thought to the second item of the day, on the inexorable progress that "superbugs" or antibiotic resistant bacteria are making at returning us to the days when there were no antibiotics. (Actually, as Carl Sagan once pointed out, it will be much worse this time.)

The headline in today's Washington Post is "Drug Resistant Staph Germs toll is higher than thought". Here's the essence:

A dangerous germ that has been spreading around the country causes more life-threatening infections than public health authorities had thought and is killing more people in the United States each year than the AIDS virus, federal health officials reported yesterday.

The microbe, a strain of a once innocuous staph bacterium that has become invulnerable to first-line antibiotics, is responsible for more than 94,000 serious infections and nearly 19,000 deaths each year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calculated.

Although mounting evidence shows that the infection is becoming more common, the estimate published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association is the first national assessment of the toll from the insidious pathogen, officials said.

"This is a significant public health problem. We should be very worried," said Scott K. Fridkin, a medical epidemiologist at the CDC.

Other researchers noted that the estimate includes only the most serious infections caused by the germ, known as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).

"It's really just the tip of the iceberg," said Elizabeth A. Bancroft, a medical epidemiologist at the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health who wrote an editorial in JAMA accompanying the new studies. "It is astounding."

This has the same ring as the items I've posted in the last few days regarding the drought and water emergency in the South ("The hard numbers have shocked the Southeast into action, even as many people wonder why things seem to have gotten so bad so quickly...") or the economic woes of Southeast Michigan (""Our" Hurricane "Katrina has been out on the horizon for a generation, and we just watched it come," said Rick Snyder, ") or Global Warming.

In fact, in 1990 we had a whole wall covered with scholarly papers at Parke-Davis warning of this coming catastrophe and the failure of antibiotics. I alluded to Carl Sagan, who told us once that "bombing us back to the stone age" would be far worse than that. At that time, people were very bright (they had to be) and could track animals, both prey and predators. They knew how to survive. Now we think food comes from the grocery store or the golden arches and if those are out of business we have no idea what to do next.

In particular, if we go back to 1900, two things stand out. First, people understood about the importance of hygiene - a word that seems so out of place in our modern world that Johns Hopkins, almost in embarrassment, took it out of the name of their "School of Hygiene and Public Health"). People understood about handling food, and washing hands, and knew this because they grew up in families where half of the children died by age 10 from infectious disease.

It wouldn't have been hard to get people to wash their hands then. Now, it seems a massive burden to even get doctors to wash their hands without constant reminders. Again, the myth of godhood and the facts of infection don't sit happily together, so one has to go - and is is usually the facts of infection and the reminder that death is really not under control at all.

These days, death of a child is an extreme event. Hasn't "modern medicine" conquered death at last? Well, the brochure and video may imply or say that, but the truth is, no, it hasn't, and death by plague is scheduled to come back to visit us again.

We don't like the idea of death - part of the theme of my last post on T. S. Eliot's message. We particularly don't like the idea of death that comes despite our best efforts and makes a mockery of our egos and sense of personal and societal godhood.

"We are gods!" is the basic social myth, and if facts disagree, well -- get rid of the facts.

In fact, in 1918, more people died of infectious disease than world war I. In fact, healthy men of age 20 would go to work in the morning and be dead by sunset. It made a mockery of our sense of control of death. And so, we have silently expunged this, deleted it, from both our memory and our textbooks. A recent study showed that the Flu of 1918, which was the biggest story of the day by far, has now become either a one-sentence note in passing, or been left out entirely of all the new history books. Interesting.

Houses had "parlors" which is where the dead family members would be laid in state, and "living rooms" were given their name as a place where the remaining, living members of the family could spend their time.

And, even more so, we had an ethic and religion that allowed us to accept this kind of damage and keep on going in the morning.

It's astounding to us. If 20 percent of our children and young adults were to die tomorrow, it's not clear this society could pick up the pieces and go on, as our grandparents had to, and did. We seem to be devastated when 3000 people die in a terrorist attack, as if that's the end of the world, not just the end of another myth of invincibility and godhood.

That ethic and religion has been jettisoned, and that is perhaps the scariest fact of all - far more so than loss of the sense of hygiene. The society is already on massive anti-depressants for life being hard, and that doesn't include losing family members right and left.

Yes, Tom Welsh's article had it right - "culture" is the core problem here. And, my root-cause analysis continues to point to our pleasant core myth of our own godhood as the core problem with the culture. If we don't learn what humility means the easy way, we'll learn it the hard way. But either way, death is coming to visit.

We can, and should, revise our mental model of Life to include Death as part of it, as a natural part, not something that is unusual. This is akin to the Japanese making houses of bamboo and flimsy paper, that could survive hurricanes and only need slight repair, or that could fall on you in an earthquake without killing you. Instead, we build concrete block towers of unreinforced masonry, because we have already put the past earthquakes out of our minds. We rebuild new houses on the flood plains and coastal barrier beaches, discarding the inconvenient truth that this won't work. Then we build our whole society up on that base.

The meaning is that most of the damage to our society and ability to go on when the epidemic comes, as it will, is of our own making. We can't go on thinking that "We didn't need all that God stuff, it was just in the way, those days are over, we have modern medicine and technology that will protect us."

Hmmmm. More likely, our modern social myths will blind us, paralyze action, and make us incapable of even thinking about these problems in a sane and rational fashion.

Death is part of life. It's just that, for this concept to work, we, as individuals, need to focus on the lives of our children, our schools, and our society, and all the things outside ourselves we have invested our lives in that will go on with life after our own individual death. Then death becomes tolerable and is not such a big deal. Everything becomes easier again, and far less frightening.

We can save the 50% or so of our "health care" bill that is spent in the last two weeks of life, trying to avoid death "at all costs." That's not "life" anyway.

It's only when the here and now, materialistic, hedonistic, selfish culture faces the stark reality of death of the individual that terror, fear, and irrational behavior result.

We can't control the ground rules of life and death, in the end. We can only be "adaptive" and adjust our culture to fit that reality. We can "get over it" as a whole society. In many ways this is simply agreeing to wear our psychological seat belts instead of refusing to install them at all. Or it's refusing to wear a life-jacket when setting out white-water rafting, because it makes us think we might end up in the water. Yes, you might.

The odds your society will end up "in the water" in that sense is 100%, and the only uncertainty is the date.

So far, we're still hoping that selective perception of parts of reality that support our myth will win the day. That's not adaptive and will not serve us well. It's not "leadership" to let that go on.

"Science" has rejected all our social flotation devices (a.k.a. religions), and said they're not "scientific" and we should get rid of them. I double checked and my current biology textbook doesn't even list "death" in the index, and "death" is not listed as a property of all living things. Isn't that strange? Why is that?

Science is pretty tone-deaf when it comes to recognizing its own blind spots, or accepting responsibility for the downstream consequences of what it does. There are some bright spots, but as a society we seem to think technology will prevent death, and try our best to hide all the old people out of sight somewhere.

That isn't coping with living - it's avoiding the subject. Science says, in large part, trust us, we'll get to that sooner or later.

OK. How about sooner? The more terrified we are of death, the more we amplify the impact of "terrorists" who only have the threat of death to scare us with. If we can look on unafraid, they will have lost all their power over us, and, again, we can get on with living.