A Failure to Educate

Reader Hannes Hacker sent me a link to an amusing video clip of the effects of dropping samples of various alkali metals into water. I won't spoil it by describing the last such demonstration, so I'll describe the second to last by quoting from the clip: "Imagine the effects of dropping a hand grenade into a bath tub."

This video clip reminded me of a memorable footnote I encountered while reading Oliver Sacks's Uncle Tungsten a couple of years ago. Sacks quotes from an autobiographical account by Linus Pauling, in which he describes how he was able to purchase potassium cyanide as a lad from the druggist:

Just think of the differences today. A young person gets interested in chemistry and is given a chemical set. But it doesn't contain potassium cyanide. It doesn't even contain copper sulfate or anything else interesting because all the interesting chemicals are considered dangerous substances. Therefore, these budding young chemists don't have a chance to do anything engrossing with their chemistry sets. As I look back, I think it is pretty remarkable that Mr. Ziegler, this friend of the family, would have so easily turned over one-third of an ounce of potassium cyanide to me, an eleven-year-old boy. (86)

For crying out loud, we have to worry about what adults might do with such substances these days! That's an important point I'll return to shortly, but not before I relate a few more vignettes.

In parallel with the above story, fellow submarine blogger Bothenook relates that it used to be fairly easy for kids to get guns and ammunition.

You've all heard the "When I was a kid...." lines.

Here's one of my own: when I was a kid, nobody in town (Burns Oregon, pop. 1400) even thought twice about seeing two 11 year olds walking down the street with side by side shotguns or 22s slung over their shoulders. I used to go to old man Wentzl's store, buy a box of #4 shot 20 gauge shotgun shells, and John would buy a box or two of 22 long rifle hollow points (Hey, those were the best dammit. We knew that hollow points were the bullet of choice of shooting writers in field and stream, so that's the best, no questions asked!) Hell, jackrabbits were just a couple of feet outside city limits. As long as you didn't point the guns back into town, nobody cared. That's what kids were supposed to do! [I guess Bo ran out of real "caps" and resorted to busting the ones from this passage, so I've slipped a few in here. My bold, too.]

Note two things about the passage in bold. (1) Our young gun fanatic knew what safety precautions to take, and I am sure this went well beyond not pointing the gun towards other people. (2) More importantly, he observed these precautions. Part of why he did is nicely summed up by the last two words, "Nobody cared." In other words, the gun-toting kids knew full well that someone would care if they did not act responsibly, and that they'd pay for it. Until (and unless) children become independent adults, it is crucial that adults make it clear to them that the irresponsible actions will have bad consequences.

Bo's wrote the above passage in reaction to a news story from which he quotes:

Police closed off most of the Golden Triangle and blocked highway exits to Downtown while they investigated reports of an armed man atop a building on Wednesday afternoon.

After about two hours of frenzied police activity, officials held a news conference on Penn Avenue and said that they had determined that the man seen by witnesses had only been shooting a pellet gun at pigeons.

In this day and age, such stories of overreaction on the part of public officials are commonplace. Still, something about that post stuck in the back of my mind, only to be jarred back, so to speak, by the explosive video above and by a story about -- of all things -- how city slickers are moving to the country only to learn about septic tanks the hard way.

"It's a big frustration," said Tom Miller, an agricultural extension agent who has spent 15 years teaching Maryland residents about septic systems. "This state has half a million households on septic, and many have no idea how to use it."

Teaching people to use their septic tanks properly doesn't mean they'll do it, according to a report last year in the Journal of Environmental Health. After canvassing Ohio counties, the authors found that "at best only a handful of residents" pumped their tanks in response to education about septic systems.

The solution, the report said, may be more aggressive regulation. After systems are installed, few local governments require that they be inspected, pumped out or maintained. [bold added]

Consider this story in relation to Bothenook's post, and you will see that only a few decades after kids could often be trusted to behave responsibly with firearms, adults cannot reliably be trusted to keep from having to pump human waste from their own property or presumably facing lawsuits for the fact that their negligence can contaminate their neighbors' wells. What's going on here?

Surely by now, I thought, if the consequences of letting a septic tank overflow were dire enough, there would already be laws on the books and court precedents to take up the slack where a homeowner's desire to keep up his property left off. But then, I realized that there are probably a million ways a negligent homeowner would be able to get off the hook.

A quick disclaimer before I move on: Much of the following is speculation. I have not researched property rights issues pertaining to septic tanks, but I have a hunch I'm probably on the right track here....

And when the government does not protect the rights of its citizens, by holding the negligent or the criminal to account, you see both an increase in noncompliance with social norms and the law, and, in response, calls for more preventative action by government officials.

Our new rural homeowners probably know they'll get a slap on the wrist at most if they let their tanks overflow, and they can just pay someone to clean up the mess anyway, so they skip the common-sense maintenance. Probably, most septic tank overflows are not a big deal when the rights of nearby property owners (vs. the false standards of environmentalism) are considered, but they can be. And when a well does get poisoned enough to sicken someone else, I am sure that every excuse is made to call it an "accident" so the negligent homeowner can escape being made an example of. This will obviously fail to encourage others to be more vigilant about their own tanks.

And so many of the same people who fight for criminals to be excused from responsibility will support the government taking an ever-larger role in making sure that what ordinary adults and even children used to be trusted to do will get done. A government official will inconvenience you at your own home to make you pump your tanks whether or not you would do that already. And law enforcement will overreact to reports that someone might have something remotely like a gun. And our lawmakers will get closer and closer to banning the possession of firearms outright.

And if I sound like I am being alarmist, consider some real-life symptoms of our society's failure to transmit its cultural norms to its children. As our society stops holding individuals accountable for their own actions, we see the apparent paradox of more government intrusion into our lives coupled with its less effective protection of our individual rights. This seeming paradox arises because we are attempting to have the government do the impossible: assume the responsibilities its citizens abdicate daily. It is no more possible to have a "centralized morality" than it is to have (the more widely-discredited) centralized economy. Why? For the very same reason: In large part, because no government bureaucracy is all-knowing or omnipotent, which is what would be required to replace the countless decisions made by individuals on a daily basis.

And so we have stories like this about drivers "refusing to buckle" their seat belts -- as if the government's job is to protect some bumpkin in a truck from his own foolishness (or pay his medical bills) at my expense.

"Those who still don't buckle up need to know that police officers will be aggressively enforcing seat belt laws throughout the country and that violators will be ticketed," said Phil Haseltine, executive director of the National Safety Council's Air Bag & Seat Belt Safety Campaign.

I submit that someone who worries more about getting a ticket than protecting his own life is not a free man and is unfit to continue living anyway. He is a second-hander focused on what others think rather than on what he should do to live his own life.

And then we have stories like this.

An investigation by the Los Angeles Times found that in the past four years, nearly 16,000 inmates released without serving their full sentences were rearrested, including 16 men who were charged with murder.

More than a quarter of those were charged with violent or life-endangering crimes such as robbery and drunken driving.

Some inmates were freed early -- sometimes spending only days in jail -- despite judges' orders that they serve their full terms, the newspaper said.

A sheriff's department analysis of booking statistics since 1999 found that inmates released early were no more likely to be rearrested than those who served full terms, the Times said. [bold]

"No more likely to be rearrested, eh?" If the government were more concerned about protecting its citizens than making sure the criminal element were comfortable in jail, or out of jail altogether, the crimes committed by such should-be inmates would be taken as an argument that they (and perhaps the ones not released early) weren't being held long enough. But in today's responsibility-free society, this is taken to mean that our lousy criminal justice system can continue conducting business as usual. This will encourage crime, not deter or prevent it.

Our society is failing to transmit the cultural elements necessary for civilized existence to the next generation. If we continue to do this, we will find out that government control of our lives is no substitute for responsible behavior on the part of most citizens.

-- CAV