Safety, yeah Right

Yesterday I walked past a road roller which displayed a sticker proclaiming ‘Proud to be Safe’. And I thought, ‘Great, but you aren’t are you?’ Sure the driver will be in the standard uniform of high vis vest, hard hat and steel toe capped boots. The risk of falling debris to a road roller driver is undoubtedly severe. And he or she will have been on lengthy induction training courses. But what about the machine driving down the road engulfing pedestrians on the pavement in toxic diesel exhaust fumes—especially children at exhaust height? Or the long term effect of those fumes on future generations, through carbon added to the atmosphere? Is this really what being “safe” means?

The problem is that today this issue of safety has got seriously out of proportion. We have an obsessive climate of workplace safety — for all the right reasons, but maybe sometimes taken too far — while we conveniently ignore the very serious harm of our way of life. A humble step ladder is deemed dangerous and discouraged in our workplace, while outside trucks churn through their gears along a residential road where children play on the street. Am I the only one that thinks this is insane?

It comes down to just picking the easy low hanging fruit and pretending to ignore the harder but much bigger ones up higher. Which suggests that it is not so much about morals or safety as it is about making a show of doing something to cover our backs against accountability. It is a sham and a pretense, revealing that we don’t truly care about safety, only about appearing to.

Because if we really did care we would be busting ourselves to stop carbon emissions. What is the odd broken bone compared to a poisoned generation of children or future mass deaths caused by flooding, super storms and rising sea levels?

Lets try to be really safe and make as big an effort for future safety as we laudably are for the present.