Getting out of bed every morning there is a chance that I could stub my toe before fully awake. Brushing my teeth I could jam the brush too far back and tear the inside of my cheek. Getting in the car and on the road is risky: more people die in car wrecks every year than have died in commercial plane crashes in the U.S. throughout aviation history. Hiking in the woods presents a cornucopia of dangers: ticks can bring Lyme disease, I could snap an ankle on uneven rock, copperheads cross the path, tree branches come crashing down unexpectedly, falling off a bluff would hurt, and I could unintentionally come between the local mountain lion and its food stash. Going to work, I could be assaulted by a client blowing up. I could be-- and have been -- fired for specious reasons with little legal recourse.
I could reduce the amount of risk I face in life by just staying at home all the time. But then a tree could fall into the house, the house could catch fire from a bare wire in the wall, I could be asphyxiated by undetected carbon monoxide, I could cut myself on a can lid or with a kitchen knife, I could slip in the bathtub and crack my head open on the stool, I could get shocked by trying to do laundry when the wiring in the machine has rubbed bare on internal metal parts, I could get a paper cut just sitting on the couch with a book...
Risk is a fact of life.
Yet when a bridge collapses unexpectedly, when miners are trapped or buried when the earth shifts and ruins their tunnels, when a tornado levels a town, when a young person dies during football practice or on an operating table, when our hearts are broken by someone we thought loved us...on and on, we have somehow come to think that these things shouldn't happen. How did we get to that point?
For example: when a death occurs we have to list a reason (it's illegal to die of old age in the U.S.; did you know that?) and we think a good percentage of deaths are wrongful. News flash: to date the rate of death among humans is one hundred percent. Every aspect of life contains risk and the law of averages takes many before they expect to go. If you somehow survive all the external risks long enough, your body at some point begins failing. How we got to the point of being offended by death is, as mentioned, legislated, and too many attorneys on the landscape prompt us to claim being wronged. We expect doctors to never err, medications to never react wrongly, and products that we buy to never present any potential harm. Never, never, never.
The word never is an absolute. It leaves no wiggle room. It's a form of perfection. Yet we live as imperfect beings in an imperfect world. To expect perfection in this life is to live outside a demonstrated reality. Not living in reality, we live in fantasy.
Good luck.
Okay, but product liability has prompted a lot of R&D in product safety to the point that our cars and children's toys and power tools are less risky than ever. Should we stop the forward progress? Some of the advances in safety were undreamt of a generation ago. Heck, when I was a kid car dashboards were solid metal. Guaranteed to knock your teeth out.
What's the acceptable level of damage from inevitable risk? "No miner deaths are acceptable," one industry spokesperson said on the radio today. It shows that the company is concerned, but it promotes an unrealistic expectation for a very risky job. It would be nice to be able to not have any tragedy, but how much stress do we hand ourselves by setting unrealistic expectations? We get accused of not caring if we say that it's likely that X number of miners will probably die this year, but we fail as administrators if our expectation of perfection is not met.
I could probably go on and on, but would only wind down to this one point: risk happens. We can get better at being more aware so that we can avoid a good amount of risk. And we could get a lot better at accepting reality even if it's tragic. It's a part of the flowing dance of life, knowing when to leap, when to dance joyfully, and when to bow gracefully.
