Cranky About Safety

Spring weather feels like it is here to stay now in Kyrgyzstan. Day by day the weather has been warming. Today was t-shirt weather. The change in people’s moods is my favorite part. Everyone get very explicably happy.

I received good news on Wednesday. The Ellison School for Russian, Eastern European, and Central Asia Studies (REECAS) at the Jackson School of International Studies (JSIS) at the University of Washington (UW) invited me to join their musing, yammering lot. At first I was unconvinced. But I tried to look at the situation logically. If as an undergrad I pursued International Political Economy at the University of Puget Sound than studying something like Comparative Sociology at the Ellison School for Russian, Eastern European and Central Asian Studies at the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington is surely the next step. Just compare the abbreviations: IPE at UPS and Csoc at REECAS at JSIS at UW. The swelling tide of multi-syllabic words (that can now compose multi-syllabic acronyms) clearly indicates that I am moving up in the world of social studies.

Do you ever go a long way for a concept that seemed funny but then it’s really not all that funny at the end? Yeah, me neither.

There was a almost-terrible almost-incident at the climbing wall yesterday. A man with his 2 year old kid wandered in (the wall is at a sort of indoor running track). While one friend and I were setting up, he decided to try once. He climbed probably four meters up. His sun stood directly underneath him and watched. I gave it the old open-palmed slap on the forehead in astonishment of the man’s irresponsibility (for himself but especially his son’s). He came back down with out incident. During the next 45 minutes three other climbers came, we climbed and the man and his son wandered around the facility and watched us in turns.

I was climbing at this point. The man came back to the wall. He started up a little bit, as curious people are apt to do. No one else spoke any Russian and did not think anything of it as passers by often try to boulder at the bottom of the while fairly frequently when they see us climbing. Then he climbed a little higher, say 2 meters off the ground. As the ground is concrete below the wall, this is the “I am not sure I would do that, but…” point. This wall was slightly more technical than the first one he tried. He promptly pushed right passed that height. At about 4 meters I noticed that him and came off the wall. Around that time he learned the blind climb dilemma. That is, it is almost universally easier and safer to go up something than to go down it. So then he got worried and climbed a little higher. Then he realized he was screwed.

He froze, he head about 20 feet above the ground. His son once again watching from directly underneath him until we moved him. There was nothing that we could do for him; once he is on the wall any attempt to help is only going to compromise his balance. He was very lucky that some Kyrgyz guys happened to be playing a native game (similar to marbles but with sheep bones). They came over and coaching him down. By the time he started to come down his legs and arms were shaking from exhaustion and/or fear. But he got down, clapped his hands and smiled sheepishly. “Ha, ha. That really got the heart going.” My head and heart will still turning with memories from the broken back last summer and the first steps for assessing and treating various dramatic injuries.

He made it down safely, I would say barely. I was pretty upset. I am very unimpressed with the machismo in South America, Russia and Kyrgyzstan. The reason we never chided him the first time is because one quickly learns that advice which could be conceived of as questioning one’s manly prowess and courage is poorly received. I had assumed that once demonstration of incompetence would suffice for the day. Never underestimate the things people are willing to do to entertain delusions of pride in nation, religion and gender identity.

The “it’s my life, I’ll do what I want” is hard to penetrate but really it’s a load of crap. It’s your life and you’ll deal with the consequence until it is a problem that you are unable to cope with and then it becomes the problem of professionals, your family and strangers. And when your kid is watching from a position where IF you screw up, he’ll break your fall (all 30 pounds of him), well then you are just an idiot. And the issue is that because the machismo argument seems to hold for single-independent men then it spills over into every part of society. No one wears seat belts and legitmate concerns about health or safety are dismissed as being whiny. And as a result more people end up dead and crippled by car accidents and work place accidents. While the individual may pay the brunt of the suffering, the family and society and a whole also ends up taking up the slack. It would be inhumane not to.

I was most sickened to watch bad decision-making being passed on between father and son without an apparent twinge of self-reproach.

As a visitor with a heavy tongue, I get used to largely playing the part of passive observer. In fact, I actively try not to project my values and ways of doing things onto the people and places I go. That is the point, to second guess the way things are ‘always done’ back home. This incident made me question how far that amnesty for cultural difference should go.

It is easy to see how cranky-‘bout-safety outdoors old-timers get that way. They are like that because enough misses and near misses eventually pierce the adolescent assumption of adventuresome invulnerability.

Next time, I will definitely say something the first time.