Our little outing to Southern Utah with the British in-laws exposed me to some more opportunities to see just how American I am. I like having my notions challenged because it is only through exposure that you can get down to the fine details of why and wherefore your beliefs have originated and whether or not they continue to be valid. Otherwise, I am liable to keep trucking along thinking that my ideas are so generic and normal that there isn't anything to see here. It's nice to be startled into knowing a new thing (well, as long as the new thing isn't that you are about to get eaten by a hungry mountain lion or some such similar gruesome fate).
It was while we were in Zion National Park that I was first startled into self-introspection (is that annoyingly redundant?). As we traveled on the shuttle up the canyon, a pre-recorded voice played over the car's loudspeakers giving us information about the areas we were driving through and the hikes available at each stop. One of the hikes was described as extremely dangerous, the trails hugging steep mountain paths with potentially fatal drop-offs lurking on one side. Hikers were strongly cautioned to take their group's skills and fitness levels into consideration. People with a fear of heights were discouraged. Bringing along small children was also discouraged. Fatalities had happened in the past. The warning concluded with, "Remember, your safety is your responsibility."
By the time the warnings were over, MIL was shaking her head in disbelief. During an ensuing conversation, she was aghast that anyone was even allowed to take the trail at all if fatalities had happened. In the U.K, she said, people would have been banned from hiking the trail if even one person had been killed. And even considering allowing children up there?? Wouldn't happen. The fact that hikers were still allowed to go with the admonition that their safety was in their hands was ludicrous.
FIL piped up that it was the same sort of thinking that he had seen in people who yelled and screamed about being forced to wear a motorcycle helmet. "There's this attitude of 'you can't tell not to get myself killed!'" he laughed.
I hadn't said anything, but I had been thinking that if people want to do stupid things, no government should stop them. The exception, of course, is when the stupid thing threatens others' rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of property (and I include reckless financial professionals in this category, although if the government is the perpetrator of harmful and reckless stupidity, that's another story altogether). It is repugnant to me to think that government can ban things "for your own safety" when it was someone's stupidity that caused a problem in the first place. Losing freedoms for security is anathema.
But here were MIL and FIL talking as if it was perfectly sensible for government to treat adult citizens like children in order to keep them safe. MIL and FIL are intelligent people, but they grew up in the culture and it seems very normal and right for them to trust government to take care of them. They don't even question why law-abiding citizens shouldn't be allowed to have guns in order to defend themselves against the lawbreakers who would like to take advantage of their weakness. Britons haven't been allowed guns for decades now, and the idea of owning a gun appears to horrify them.
I'm not saying MIL and FIL are bad people for believing as they do. Not by any possible means are they bad people, and my point is certainly not to state that I'm right and they're wrong. That would just be perpetuating the stereotype of American arrogance and the belief that our ways are always the best ways.
No, what struck me was the difference in thought processes and attitudes. My American independence has been bred into me from birth. They find it strange and alarming in many ways that we are so determined to leap into bad situations simply because no one can tell us, lawfully, that we can't. I find their trust of government to be equally strange and alarming. But without hearing a different viewpoint, I'm not likely to be able to effectively sift through and sort out exactly how I believe as I do. It's an enlightening process.
Now excuse me while I get my gear together to go and find some hungry mountain lions hunting for me as I take whatever steep and dangerous hiking path I choose. What? I'll bring my repeating rifle, but you can't make me use a motorcycle helmet during the journey.
No comments:
Post a Comment