This has been a long couple of weeks. We don’t like it when our routines are messed up. And while I’d love to get all super-spiritual and talk about the biblical metaphor of snow for grace and forgiveness…. I won’t. But what I will talk about is a few of things I’ve observed recently on how this infringement affect us. It’s exposing some bad habits in our speech and I’m trying to wrap my mind around it. So here’s what I’ve seen:
Everyone thinks they’re an expert
There is a tendency among us to think we are better than we are. I’m assuming it’s pride but I’m no expert… or am I? Hmmm… That’s for a different day… we all assume we are expert on any given topic and that we have all the necessary information, and we even assume that our armchair understanding is automatically correct. Really?! That’s how you would have made that play if you were the quarterback?! Really?! During this record snowfall, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard phrases like “back in Indiana, we’d have only been out of school for one day in this!” or “back in Illinois, we knew how to deal with snow! We would have salted the roads ahead of time and had 300 plows working around the clock” or “back in Michigan, we wouldn’t have even noticed it was snowing!” I get it. We think that if we speak as if we are blowing everything off, then we will convince people we are an expert on a subject. And we definitely don’t like to be questioned. Cause who are you to question me?! Why do we think we’re an expert on everything and that there couldn’t possibly be something we’re missing or unaware of?
But everyone else is the problem
“It’s not me I’m worried about, it’s all the people out there who don’t know how to drive in snow!” I’d go out on a limb and say that 99% of the population feels that way. There’s a certain logical fallacy in this line of thought however. Think about it - If everyone else is the problem, then either no one is the problem or everyone is the problem. I’m gonna go with…. everyone. Or better yet, we could just be honest and admit that very few of us are actually experts at driving in snow and we’re just getting out there and hoping for the best. Most of us who say we are good drivers are basing that on things like never having caused an accident, or never having been stuck in snow, or running off the road in ice, or tending to be able to navigate traffic quickly and efficiently (while speeding), or even knowing about cars and engines. It is almost never from any sort of real training or philosophy or intentionality. It’s just a learned skill that likely contains an assortment of bad habits. I watch people follow WAY too close in heavy traffic and then they wonder why they have to slam on the brakes so often. I watch people text and drive (which I’m perfectly fine with as a whole) but then they assume they’re the only one on the road with that caliber of multitasking ability. I’ve ridden with people who creep into the other guy’s lane but get mad when he does it – cause the fact that I did it is the exception, not the norm! Right? We assume the worst in others, and give ourselves the benefit of the doubt. At the end of the day, all I’m really is saying is that we ought to be careful with the mentality that everyone else is the problem. It’s quite an assumption, not to mention arrogant. But I still think the problem is bigger….
There’s always more to the story
During my freshman year in college, they were building new dorms. We watched from our current cement dorm rooms as construction began. The first 2 or 3 months consisted of moving dirt out of was to be the parking lot. A friend of mine at the time kept complaining more and more that there was no way possible they would meet their deadline and that they should move all that dirt later – they need to be working on the building, not the dirt in the parking lot! He was even considering going to the contractor and letting him know that they had their priorities out of whack. Turns out, the guys who are actually experts had figured out a way to save a whole bunch of time and money. Instead of trucking in load after load of the dirt they needed to level out the land for the foundation of the building, they could just dig it up on-site and move it from the future parking lot. So it turns out that my friend was indeed not the expert he thought he was and that there was clearly more to the story. I’m glad he didn’t open his mouth to them, as I’m sure he is as well.
Here today in Missouri, we are looking at roads not getting plowed and schools canceling day after day and cars off the road. “Back in Indiana, we wouldn’t have canceled school this much!” “Back in Illinois, we would have plowed the roads so well you could see sparks coming off the blade, there’d be nothing but pavement left!” Here’s the deal. They use different materials in different regions of the country to build roads, based on the general climate of the region. Of course you can drop the blade so low you make sparks on roads further north, they use certain asphalt that can withstand the abuse of a huge metal blade scraping along it. That asphalt also lays flatter, otherwise the blade actually scrapes off layers of blacktop if it’s uneven. Our Missouri roads cannot take that level of torture. It would destroy them. But I bet our Missouri roads handle 110 degree heat better than Michigan roads. So let’s scrape the crap out of the roads, and if clearing the ice and snow is worth that level of damage, then so be it. But come spring, get ready for lots of new road construction to complain about.
The second half of the plowing issue is this. Of course the northern states plow and salt more! Do you really think it would be practical to have salt silos and tons of snow plows just lying around when our region gets very little snow comparatively?! No. That would be expensive and unrealistic. But it’s certainly easier to complain than to spend the five seconds in thought it would take to come to that realization on your own. And then when they do plow what they can, it’s never quite enough. “Why couldn’t they have plowed this one little road?! It’s just one more trip!” Frankly I don’t know why they couldn’t have plowed that one more road, but I refuse to assume it is because they are idiots.
School has gotten canceled many many days. The assumption I gather listening to everyone’s verbiage is that the school superintendent is a lazy idiot who makes dumb decisions and we should be educating these kids and not letting them stay home and be bored and getting into who knows what kind of trouble and their parents have to go to work anyway so why not just have school cause back in Indiana…. Surely we don’t actually think the man (or woman) who is making this decision is an idiot, right? We (CIY) canceled an event last week. Can you imagine if we chose to go ahead with the event and a van full of junior high students went off an overpass?! Not okay. So if Joplin and Webb had school and some kid froze to death at the bus stop or a bus slid into an intersection, would that have been an acceptable loss? Hmmm….I’m not advocating always playing it safe, there is certainly a time to make the harder less-safe choice, but I’m not sure this is one of them. College Heights can open up because they are a private school with no busses. Parents can take students in themselves, at their own discretion. That one parent isn’t making the decision for 4,000 students.
This last Monday, a school in Laurie, MO decided to open school despite the ice and snow. They did some rerouting of bus stops and whatnot to make it all work. Because the routes were different however, a little girl running to catch the bus she missed slipped on the ice and wound up under the bus’s back tires. Her brother tried to pull her out and had his legs crushed as well, worse then hers. Their lives will never be the same. Was one day of school worth that?! Sure you could argue that accidents happen, but this was obviously a direct result of opening school during very bad cold weather and hoping for the best. So no, I’m not saying that there’s a one to one cause and effect relationship every time (opening school = injured child), I’m just saying there isn’t always a clean choice and to assume otherwise is shortsighted. And I’m glad it’s not my decision, cause there’s usually more to the story.
Something to say
The more I work through this, what I am growing more and more convinced of is that we’ve developed a nasty habit of having to have something to say. This desire to have something to say begins to overrun objectivity, kindness, intellectual honesty, and most importantly, truth. I think deep down we know that the school superintendent and the plow guy are not idiots. And we know that AT&T and Apple aren’t just a bunch of bumbling morons trying to trick us into thinking we’re getting a great product while they secretly screw us. Last I checked, the iPhone is the most powerful mobile computer in that form factor publicly available on the planet. That’s a big deal, that costs a lot of money and you want it to be cheaper?! We didn’t even know any of this was possible 5 years ago! The fact that it works at all and the fact that we actually have signal the vast majority of the time is already a freaking miracle! So I’m afraid that our complaining is really just showing that truth is becoming secondary to just needing to have something to say, something to complain about. And I’m not okay with that. My bible tells me that my tongue is that most difficult thing to control and I’m still seeing that we suck at it, cause complaining is so much easier…
Conclusions
In these specific examples, all the complaining is indicative of one of the following: 1. You think the people that make those decisions don’t know what they’re doing – they’re unqualified; or 2. You think you know more about running school districts, operating plowing companies and managing public safety than the people who get paid to do these jobs currently; or 3. It was just something to say and deep down you really don’t mean much of it. If it’s #1, your level of presumptuousness is astounding. Grow up, things are drastically more complex that you’ve imagined. If it’s #2, please do what you can to learn about jobs other than your own and think about how annoying it would be to have people you’ve never met and who have no perspective on what your job really is spending their time criticizing your work and thinking they could do it better. And if it’s #3, please stop. This amounts to lying. It’s divisive, it’s gossip, it’s slander, it’s negativity, it’s dangerous. You might think it’s harmless but it’s not. And if you’re doing it without even being aware of it, that can demonstrate how deep within your habits this may lie. Get control. Take the blinders off. Look around. See something that’s not you. Stop assuming the worst, begin assuming the best in people. That's where I fail... I'll try if you do...
