Why Can’t We Do ANYTHING Right?
Doesn’t it SEEM that we just can’t do ANYTHING right any longer? During a typical baby boomer’s youth, train wrecks were a RARE occurrence. Subways ran regularly without mishap. False civil defense warnings were unheard of. And news reporters got the story straight. The FIRST time.
Lately, major train wrecks seem to happen every couple of months. We’ve had 2 fatal wrecks and one non fatal mishap in a WEEK’S TIME! Looking back at just the last five years we find the following: 2013 Metro-North, Fairfield, Connecticut, multiple injuries. 2013 CSX, Spuyten Duyvil, NY, 4 dead. 2015 Metro-North, Valhalla NY, 6 dead, 15 injured. 2015 Metrolink, California 1 dead, 29 injured. 2015 Amtrak: Halifax, North Carolina: 55 injured. 2015 Expo Line, Los Angeles: 12 injured. 2015 Amtrak, Philadelphia: 8 dead, 200 injured. 2016 Amtrak, Chester, Pennsylvania: 2 dead, 41 injured. 2016 Amtrak, Cimarron, Kansas: 28 injured. 2016 NJ Transit, Hoboken: 1 dead, 144 injured. 2017 Metropolitan Transit Authority, Brooklyn: 103 injured. 2017 Washington Line, Dupont Washington: 3 dead, 23 injured. 2018: Cayce Line, Cayce, South Carolina: 2 dead, 116 injured. Feb 1, 2018, Amtrak, Crozet, Virginia: 1 dead. Feb 5, 2018, Amtrak, South Carolina: 2 dead, 116 injured. Feb 6, 2018 (Monday) Amtrak, Havre de Grace, Maryland: train car separation. No injuries reported so far. Quite a list, isn’t it?
And how about false warning messages? On Saturday January 13, 2018, residents of Hawaii thought it was “THE BIG ONE”. An emergency alert was broadcast warning of AN INCOMING BALLISTIC MISSILE! This went out on TV, Radio, Social Media, and Civil Defense Systems. It took 45 minutes for an “all clear” message to go out. The message said: “No missile.” It should have read: RELAX EVERYONE, JUST KIDDING! And, least you think this type of thing might be an isolated occurrence, just this morning the National Weather Service triggered a TSUNAMI warning on the Accuweather System from Houston to New England! Suffice it to say, no tsunami struck.
Then, of course, there’s the apparent inability of major media to get their stories straight. Unfortunately, an interested reader can’t simply Google “Fake News” to investigate this topic because there is a high degree of subjectivity as to what’s fake and what isn’t. I have, however, cleverly found a way to get around this problem, at least on a basic level. To get a minimalist list of bad reporting, one can simply look up: MEDIA RETRACTIONS! There you will find false reporting that even the media outlets themselves must own up to. There are MANY. There’s ABC News issuing a retraction on their reporting on Michael Flynn. There’s NBC claiming to have a quote from Vladimir Putin saying that he had compromising info on Trump. NBC had to retract this when it was learned that Putin NEVER SAID ANY SUCH THING! Then there was a CNN retraction on Jun 27, 2015 of an article linking Anthony Scaramoucci to Russian investments. Then a CNN retraction in June 2016 about Comey’s conversations with Trump. Then CNN, AGAIN retracting a story in December, 2016, on the timing of emails to Trump from Wikileaks. Then the New York Times in June 2017 retracting a story linking Congressman Steve Scalise’s shooting with Gabriel Gifford’s shooting. The interested reader will find many more examples. Doesn’t ANYONE cross check these?
So, why CAN’T we run our trains and subways safely, send out civil defense warnings appropriately, and deliver news stories accurately? It can’t be lack of education; America has a higher percentage of educated citizen’s than ever before. It can’t be lack of information. The internet has made more information readily available than at any time in history. And it can’t be from lack of oversight; we’ve got more government required and organizationally mandated “quality assessment” metrics than ever before. So WHAT GIVES???
I have a SNEAKY SUSPICION that one of the main culprits is that America has strayed, sometimes blatantly, sometimes surreptitiously, from organizational MERITOCRACY as our society’s modus operandi. In our primary and secondary education, grades have been increasingly DE-EMPHASIZED. Later, in the workforce, individual performance metrics have been “watered down” as a requirement for recruitment and advancement. In corporations and organizations through out the land, we select workers based partially on “diversity” factors, and perhaps, especially in the media, on ideological factors. We advance individuals, often times, with an eye to quotas, either formally or informally. And, MOST importantly, when there’s bad performance, modern management philosophy demands that the “system” be blamed, and “systemic solutions” are sought rather than firing the bozo that screwed up in the first place. (Thanks LRM).
Of course, it must be conceded that this is a complicated issue, and, undoubtably, there’s more to it. But, our nation’s happy-go-lucky turn away from meritocracy, I am also SURE, is a big part of it.
Just sayin’.