distance – The View from a Drawbridge

Arms’ Length

Let’s not stop killing. Let’s just do it from a distance.

Sometimes I wonder about the first hominid who intentionally killed another hominid. (And I’d bet my life it was a man.) Was he horrified at what he had done? Or did he look at it the same way he looked at hunting animals for food?

Here’s where it gets weird for me. If he was horrified, shouldn’t the natural instinct have been to say, “Right. That was scary and gross. Let’s try not to do that ever again.”

Instead (and I find this very telling), Man went in a completely different direction as a result of that horror. What they actually seem to have thought was, “Right. That was scary and gross. Let’s try to come up with some way that we can do that without having to actually watch the light go out of their eyes as we get spattered with gore.”

In other words, let’s not stop killing. Let’s just do it from a greater distance.

And then, as everyone jumped on that bandwagon, the main goal was to come up with weapons that had a longer range than the other guys’, so you could win. And on it went, throughout history, to the point where today some kid in a uniform in a trailer in Nevada can take out a caravan of Afghani women and children without even having to break a sweat. And the guilt factor from that remove must be akin to knocking out your best friend’s Pokemon. Yay us.

The first murder was probably done with a stone or a tree branch. You could feel the vibration of the impact go down your arm. You could smell the copper in their blood. That was still the case when we progressed to swords and axes and maces. Now you just look at a computer screen, and go, “Oops. Well, they looked like bad guys…”

Children today don’t have to worry about sticks and stones breaking their bones. They have to worry about some nutjob with an AK-47 semi-automatic that can fire 40 rounds per minute as far as 380 yards. They’re not taught how to play musical chairs anymore. They’re taught to duck and cover. And, for what it’s worth, anyone who thinks this is the cross we all should bear so that they can maintain their 2^nd Amendment rights is f***ed up beyond recognition.

Think about this. A blowpipe had a range of 60 feet. An atlatl could throw a spear 60-300 feet, but its accuracy rapidly diminished. An English Longbow could send a heavy arrow 819 feet, and light arrow as far as 1077 feet. Interestingly enough, a Brown Bess Musket, such as those that would have been used in the Revolutionary War, had an effective firing range of 900 feet. So our founding fathers hadn’t progressed much beyond the longbow, and probably assumed our progress would continue to be that slow. Such was the world when the second amendment was written.

Now, a light machine gun can go 3000 feet. A heavy one can go twice as far, which means, if you’re keeping track, that at this point we could kill each other from more than a mile away. And if you get ahold of an anti-tank missile, your range is 12,303 feet. Whereas an MLRS rocket artillery system has a range of 137,280 feet. That means you can kill someone 26 miles away, sit down to Sunday dinner, and say grace without even having to allow yourself a hint of irony. Can I get an Amen?

And we Americans invented the predator drones, which you can fire via a satellite uplink from the other side of the world. These drones are longer than a 3 story building is tall, and they can cruise around up there, like sharks searching for wounded fish, for 24 hours or more. One could be flying over you this very minute, and you’d never know. Nothing scary or gross about that, right?

Make no mistake: Humans are the most terrifying animals of all.

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Violence Radius

A friend just sent me a link to an article about a man who had been stabbed to death in a park in Florida. I was horrified. For 27 years I owned a house not more than 50 yards from the scene of the crime. If I had still been living there, I could very well have been sitting on my front porch as the murder was taking place, and I’d have had an unobstructed view. That’s a little too close for comfort.

We live in a violent world. All violence is horrifying, but I think most of us have a filter these days. If we reacted in equal measure to all violent acts, we’d be unable to cope. Therefore, we tend to feel much more strongly about brutality when it’s more personal.

Location plays a big part in our filter. If it’s close to home, or to a place we used to frequent, that’s particularly sobering. It’s perfectly natural to think, “That could have been me.”

Familiarity is also a factor. If the victim was someone we know or love, or even feel like we know by dint of them being a public figure, then of course the situation will have extra shock value. There’s a reason why homeless people die every day and it never makes the papers. We don’t know them, so we don’t “have to” care.

And then there’s the relatability issue. We like our wars to be very far away, on foreign soil, where the people don’t look, talk, or act like us. It’s much easier to not have to think of it that way. On some level, it’s so different from our day to day lives that it can almost be considered science fiction. Terrorist attacks on our own soil, on the other hand, are enough to have us all gibbering over our morning coffee.

There really needs to be some sort of happy medium. It’s too much to take on board every violent act that we hear about. But on the other hand, it’s important to realize that every savage act is one savage act too many.

Still, the fact that I have spent countless hours on the park bench where that man bled out, and the very block where I once lived was blocked off by crime scene tape, has me rattled.

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Suspicious Package

I was walking to the south end of my bridge to do some much-needed maintenance when I came upon a large shopping bag, apparently stuffed full of clothing. It was right in the middle of the sidewalk and no one was in sight. I wasn’t about to go rooting around in this bag. After all, I once wrote about a hand grenade being found on a bridge. You just never know.

After alerting my supervisor, I spoke to the 911 operator and described the package. They said they would send someone out right away. This was good news, because not only would I like to keep my bridge, but this package was, coincidentally, only about 20 feet from my new (to me) car. That’ll ruin your whole day.

It was a little awkward. I didn’t want to leave this bag unattended. We get a lot of pedestrian traffic. So I stayed there, but at a safe distance.

But what is a safe distance, anyway? Close enough to keep the public away from the bag, but far enough not to be maimed for life if it exploded was what I was shooting for. I also didn’t want to stand so far away that I looked like a paranoid dope when it turned out to be just a bag of clothes as I strongly suspected it would. I spent an unbelievably long time pondering the sweet spot of distances until the officer arrived on the scene.

He reassured me that I’d done the right thing by calling. One cannot be too cautious in this day and age. He then inspected the bag from all angles, and asked if I had heard any sounds or seen any wires. No and no. So he then extended his baton to its full length and gingerly used it to pull out the first layer of stuff, which turned out to be a towel. I held my breath.

The bag’s contents included a beach towel, a jacket, and a very nice ballpoint pen. That seems like kind of a strange combination, but I guess we’ll never know the whole story. At least I know more of the story than all the joggers and bicyclers that hurried past. If they sensed my adrenaline dump, they definitely had no idea of its cause.

Just another day on the drawbridge. Move along. Nothing to see here. Your tax dollars at work.

Boom