Speed and Luck

.
I’ve been trying to become more environmentally responsible. I started recycling more than the aluminum cans and newspapers that Dillons takes, I try to remember not to run the water when I’m brushing my teeth, and I’ve decided to drive more slowly when I can.

So I set myself the goal of going no faster than the speed limit and, when reasonable, to use the cruise control to keep myself down to a speed at least 10% less than the speed limit or 5 mph below it, whichever is less. “When reasonable” means that I try not to hold up traffic at rush hour, especially on Kellogg, or in work areas where traffic is down to one lane and the people behind me can’t get around.

It is surprising to me how many other drivers go the speed limit or lower. I often come up behind a car and have to slow down because they are dawdling along. I don’t know if they are out enjoying the sights or simply unable to drive faster for some reason, but when I first started following my semi-irrational rules, I found those drivers incredibly irritating.

Then one day I told myself to just chill. Was the world going to end if I took an extra two or three minutes to reach Dillons? Would the library close if I returned my book at 10:03 instead of 10:01? Would I really die if I didn’t hear the sign-on music of “Countdown?”

What is the hurry?

Hurry makes us do things badly. We’re in a hurry, so we don’t really stop at the stop sign. We’re in a hurry, so we don’t read all the instructions on the error message. We’re in a hurry, so we mis-type and screw up the project.

We trust to luck that there won’t be a car coming, that the error message wasn’t important, that we won’t mis-type too often and can make amends with a simple apology.

But luck only gets you so far.

George W. Bush was in a hurry after 9/11 to prove that he wasn’t a bad president. He attacked Afghanistan before his people had really had time to scope the place out, so he placed too much trust in the warlords that used him to conquer their closest enemies. After the “shock and awe” (Oh, I bet they wished they’d come up with that phrase earlier.), searching for Bin Laden was too slow, so he turned his attention to Saddam. Saddam was who he really wanted, after all.

I surely don’t need to detail the rest of the story. He couldn’t be bothered to wait to learn about Iraq, so he got rid of all the people who said things he didn’t want to hear. Planning for the time after “mission accomplished” would have wasted time, so he just went with the easy form of warfare Donald Rumsfeld said was the latest thing.

Now we hear that he was so impatient to prove that Saddam had ties to Al-Qaida that he had people tortured until they “confirmed” it , even though he had been warned that these “enhanced interrogation techniques” would elicit only false and inaccurate testimony.

Yes, hurry makes us careless. What can you say about a man so careless he killed more than 4,000 American soldiers and uncounted thousands of innocent civilians, just because he couldn’t be bothered to take the time to get it right?

I’d say his belief in his luck took us too far too fast.
.