The Dangerous Playground

 

I just want you to do a thought experiment with me for a little bit. You are a park administrator. The town council has allocated certain funds to build a playground in the park you administrate. They want, specifically, a jungle gym, slide, and swing set--the sorts of things that would be attractive and fun for children. There is already a designated space and it has been partially paved. There is no compelling reason not to use the allocated funds to build the jungle gym, slide and swing set. 

However, you don't especially love the idea of the playground itself on general principles and are trying to save park administration money because you have as yet to be determined reasons and saving money looks great on your personal resume.

So you hire three, let's call them-- "Stooges". They say they are builders, and that's good enough for you, because they seem bright enough. And they use some pre-made kits to get the ball rolling and build something that looks like the promised picture--but there are lots of unused parts. They have no idea how those go together, and assume they are just extras and cart them off. 

They are, actually, reinforcing beams, retaining straps, cement screws--parts intended to ensure the whole apparatus doesn't cave in under the weight of child bodies, fall over in a stiff breeze, or send children flying. But these budget builder fly-by-nights had no idea how anything worked, and now, we have kids approaching a rickety playground of doom. 

Kiddie carnage awaits. 

You probably get what I'm driving at. We have people fiddling about in government who don't exactly know how anything works, who don't understand why the rules are what they are, who are "cutting costs" without caring why the costs exist and think the safety-related parts of a device meant to be used by people for their protection are just something "extra" they don't need to be concerned about. 

Instead of making things better, they are making things worse and their ignorance will cost more money in the long run--via lawsuits and lost lives, wages, unintended injuries and so on. 

Consider this:

DOGE claimed they found people collecting Social Security who were 150 years old. Improbably, right? But I looked up the first recipient of monthly SS checks--Ida May Fuller. born in 1874. Sure, it was possible that we did have people with a birth year in the 1800s in the rolls--but they would have been recorded as having DIED. The Social Security death record is so vast and complete, genealogists have relied on its data. If you know anyone who ever applied for Social Security disability--you know they aren't saps paying out to people just because. 

It was a coding issue--the computer language COBOL defaults to 1875 if there is no birth date. And a lot of rural older folks don't properly have birth certificates--even today.  There's some religious or anti-government people who try to raise their kids "off-grid" and use midwives and don't record their kids. 

So, if they've worked their whole lives, are we fucking their retirement up for a paperwork issue? Or do we try to work around their reality and let them have full participation in our civic life, their dignity, right to vote, et. 

We have a dangerous slide.

So, let's say people somehow don't understand what the VA crisis line is about, or what our FDA food inspectors do, or the USDA, or who actually does forestry service to prevent wildfires (as best they can), how HHS and CDC resources for potential epidemic threats have been damaged.

And how somehow, a few hundred people at the National Nuclear Security Administration were fired and had to be rehired because the pumpkin heads involved had no idea what "nuclear security" meant. They have a website and all! 

So this is something like the infrastructure we depend upon no longer having the support we relied on and barely realized was there because it was working. And now it won't. And we can predict actual dangers. 

Because someone (s) careless and selfish decided they wanted to let stooges remake the playground. And people will be hurt and people may well die and there will be a flurry of lawsuits, and none of this is efficient or good at all. 

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Picture and blogpost title inspired by this article as a useful analogy. Maybe the dangerous old playgrounds of yesteryear were "dangerous"--but they were built by people who weren't trying to do it on the cheap and with blatant disregard for human life on this scale.