June 9^th, 2004

A Haiku for you:

Since my wisdom teeth
Have all been pulled from my mouth
I get more headaches

I have a friend who likes to talk about current issues. You know, the sorts of things that you can find on page 3 in a daily newspaper. Personally, I've got nothing against that; I'll often talk about these things with him. If nothing else, we can pass the time. About the only self-defence mechanism that has evolved over time with him is that when he says, "what's your opinion on ..." I will always yield the first shot to him and reply, "I dunno ... what's yours?" And that's just because he always has an opinion when he asks for mine, and I'd rather let him get his ideas out first so I'm not defending an opinion I haven't thought much about. It's cool, he means nothing sinister; he's just being polite (God knows why, I've known him for 22 years ...)

But the reason I tend not to write my rants about scandals-du-jour here is that I think of them as symptoms, not really issues in and of themselves.

Think of it like this:

A patient goes to his doctor complaining of swollen legs and ankles. The doctor takes a look at his ankles and determines that gout must be the problem. So the patient gets his gout medication and goes home and starts taking it. But the next week he is back at his doctor's office complaining that he is having trouble sleeping, and he walks around like a zombie all day. So the doctor writes him up a prescription for sleeping pills, and the guy goes home with a bottle of those. Unfortunately, the guy is back in his doctor's office the next week complaining of cramping muscles. The doctor (who must have a lot on his mind) writes out another prescription, this time for muscle relaxants. Well, the guy goes and gets that one filled as well, though the very next day he wakes up and his eyes are puffy, he can barely feel his hands and feet, and his skin is distinctly yellow.

"Geez!" he thinks to himself, "I've got a lot of problems!"

So he goes to another doctor (his regular doctor is in court that day defending an unrelated malpractice suit) and tells this other doctor his last month's medical history.

"By Hohner's Hairline!" the doctor exclaims, "We should test your urine for evidence of renal failure!"

See? A bunch of symptoms treated separately and out of context led to a missed diagnosis of the real problem.

* * *

So, by extension, think about it like this:

In the first five pages of today's newspaper I found these stories:

• A 23-year-old man, wanted on warrants for abusing a 2-year-old, pimping, and sexual assault encourages his 17-year-old girlfriend to "escape" home and church.
• Alarmingly-high baby death rate in Surrey (where else?) attributed to young, poor, and uneducated mothers.
• A male high-school teacher in Calgary abusing his position of authority to extort sex out of his female students.
• And at the top of Page 1, an advetisement for a music festival showing four girls, apparently under 20, in bikinis and "partying".

Oy vey.

One could look at this and think to oneself, "so many problems here" and ignore the fact that there is a single underlying problem, with these as the symptoms. My friend and I could sit at the coffee shop and discuss the 17-year-old girl for an hour or so, but we would just be talking about a single symptom of another (and, I think, quite different) problem.

So why don't we talk about that problem? Because it's harder to do. Because it's uncomfortable. Because there are widely-diverging responses to the immaturity that men and women show. There's the "real man" end of the spectrum, sort of a knee-jerk response that says if men were men and women were women, just like they used to be, then everything would be all right. Then there's the radical feminist viewpoint which, while thoughtful and intelligent, usually descends into simple villification of men. Both are wrong, both are sort of right (in my opinion), but the bulk of my feelings right now lean towards a lack of maturity being instilled in young men and women. I think it really boils down to a lack of character shown by parents in showing their souls to their children. This is a progressive trend and, I suspect, ultimately fatal to Western so-called civilization.

But my point isn't about male and female relations. My point is that minutiae can blind a person to the underpinnings of a problem. It is possible (and I think that lately it has been the norm) to react to the symptoms by treating them as isolated problems, and ignore the underlying causes of these symptoms.

* * *

Addendum: Of course, one could take it too far and say, "Aha, the problem is the human race itself. Therefore, I must solve the problem by eliminating everyone ... exterminate them ... ex-ter-min-ate ... ex-ter-min-ate ...

Back to the Rant-o-Rama index.