The Subliminal Slide - a ramble-and-a-half...

The following rant is a bit disjointed and bounces around a bit. My apologies.

At the end of 2001 the average number of assaults on Calgary Transit operators jumped from 5 per year to 30 per year and in 2007 there were 57. There was a also a small spike in the number of assaults in 1999. This was a North America-wide trend.

What the hell could have caused first the little spike in '99 and what could have caused the huge jump in 2002 and the steady climb up in the six subsequent years?

I put forward the idea that the spike in 1999 was due to the tension preceding the millennium and the naysayers calling for the end of the world, or at least a crash in all systems when the date rolled over on New Year's Eve. We didn't know what was going to happen when that nearly mystical event occurred and so as tensions rose, so did either people's tempers or their belief that if the world was coming to an end they might as well act like the idiots they really were behind closed doors. Or both.

I place the blame for the immediate rise of assaults in 2002 on the events on September 11th, 2001. 9-11?! You betcha! In late 2001 the biggest enforcer on the planet, the self-appointed police of freedom, the USA, was dealt a deadly, destructive blow by a handful of zealous bullies right in the heart of the heart of America, and since then even the biggest 'cop' on the planet hasn't been able to catch one little miscreant, even with the help of a handful of other enforcers. Osama Bin Laden still roams free, unless you subscribe to the whole theory that it was all a conspiracy. Whether you believe the story we've been fed or not doesn't matter a whit because what I'm leading up to is that it's what society believes that is making the difference.

There are two post 9-11 ramifications which I want to touch on here. The first is the obvious one, the idea that since the attacks the changes in security measures as well as the fear of being attacked has risen considerably, especially since there have been attacks elsewhere in the world. Fear causes tension to rise.

But there is a secondary, more subtle result of a world-shaking event such as the attacks on 9-11 and that's the idea that if the USA and all its gadgets and weapons and allies and subversive information gathering can't find Osama Bin Laden, then they'll never catch me. It's like the breakdown in society when there's an extended blackout or even a riot when usually sedate, 'normal' citizens are suddenly committing crimes, caught up on the pack's frenzy. Except that I'm not talking about a frenzy. This is a subconscious thing, like watching five cars speed past a parked police car and then increasing your own speed a bit as you go past, not worried about being caught or punished.

With the internet and the ability to disseminate news around the planet in a split second, a mob doesn't have to be in the same physical space for the mob mentality to bubble up and make subtle tweaks and changes to behaviors. It starts small, like a kid who successfully shoplifts a candy bar on a dare from his friends and eventually works his way up to stealing cars. If he never gets caught along the way, then bravado and a lack of faith in the system cause a gradual escalation in his law-breaking. But I hear you protesting that not all kids who shoplift grow up to steal cars, and you're quite right. Sometimes they go on to get university degrees and get married and raise families and only cheat on their income tax or lie to an insurance company when making a claim, or even steal from the funds they manage for their clients.

It's subtle, not out of the blue, because of a gradual escalation in social unrest, social disquiet and because of the sometimes not-so-subtle social infection weaving its way through our collective subconscious. An infection that slowly convinces us that we won't get caught.
I mean, really, how many people would actually obey ALL the rules if there were/was no one but ourselves to police us and enforce the rules? I know I wouldn't just go out and beat up an obnoxious neighbor, but would I walk past a Future Shop being looted without going in and 'liberating' a new laptop? I like to think that I wouldn't, but is it because of fear of authority or because I know it's wrong? I know me well enough to admit that I can't give you a definitive answer, based on some of my less-than-stellar activities as a kid. I can honestly say that I know only two people who would walk away from looting, and one of them would even try to reinforce the doors to stop it from continuing. If I were there with him I would help.

We are a self-destructive species. I believe that it's only competition, ambition and laziness which separates us from the other beasts. Because we cherish our possessions and our comfort level, we have created multiple systems to protect ourpossessions and positions and to enforce the rules we've set out, and to punish the transgressors who would take anything from us. But it's the same competitiveness, ambition and laziness which makes us covet what others have and then want to take it from them.

Because this is all within the root or foundation of our species, I don;t believe it takes much to bring it to the surface. One of our biggest motivators is fear. Fear can motivate us to cower, to fight, to run away, to freeze in place, to do just about anything. Sometimes the object of our fear is standing right in our face, such as an attacker; and sometimes the object is an event, waiting for us just around the corner, in the future, like a first date or a trial or the millennium.

There was so much negative chatter and theorizing regarding system failures leading up to New Year's Eve, 1999, that it all became fear-mongering, and then tension rose and tempers flared. I'm convinced that the assault spike on bus operators in 1999 was a result of this fear, combined with fearlessness from the already established misfits who thought they saw the end coming and figured there'd be no consequences to their actions.

As for the 600% assault increase in 2002? 9-11, plain and not so simple. The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were made against only one nation, but they changed the world. Everything from insurance rates to racial profiling to the way we travel has changed. Even the numbers of non-suicide airliner hijackings has decreased after the brave passengers of that ill-fated United Airlines flight stormed the hijackers and gave their lives to stop the attack.

Once again, the fact that the biggest enforcer on the planet still can't hunt down and punish the man blamed for the attacks has created a "If they can't catch him they won't catch me so I'll get away with this shit and no one will punish me" mentality.

The increase in assaults isn't just a case of bad attitudes bubbling to the surface, it's also fear and stress. Stress? Sure. 9-11 shook the financial markets from top to bottom and so the disparity between the cost of living and the wages we earn has made life harder. We work longer hours at jobs we may not enjoy in order to take home less money than we need to care for family who all have their own stresses. It's a cycle, and an often subtle one at that, but it's there, and it can make us yell or gesture or strike out when the heat of the moment arises. And a little Prozac won't make it go away.

We also have to ask if this underlying fear of where we're headed as a species is making us all a bit skittish and a little more sensitive to minor insults than we used to be. It's a snowball effect where one event leads to another which leads to another which leads... you get my drift. You get snappy at me, I snap back. Frustrated that the situation went bad, I snap even louder at my next encounter and they react by snapping back at me (maybe) and then taking it out even harder on someone else, their spouse or child or employee or whomever. When the underlying cause is so widespread and subsurface, the change can be so subtle that we don't notice it from encounter to encounter until suddenly the mild-mannered reporter snaps and punches a bus driver who tells him that his transfer has expired.

So, where is all this subliminal downward spiral leading? I couldn't begin to tell you. I can just theorize about what could be causing it, other than the growing divorce rate in Western society, video games and rock & roll. Maybe I'm way off base with my theory and we should just blame it all on the resurgence of the music of ABBA.

That's all I have to say about that.

Ciao for now.

Tim Reynolds.
Author of Stand Up & Succeed
www.StandUpAndSucceed.com

The Signing of Books

We've all seen them in a bookstore somewhere --- lonely authors sitting at a table, trying to convince complete strangers that the printed and bound hopes and dreams stacked around them are worthy of the strangers' hard-earned dough-ray-me. Well, on Saturday, September 27th I spent five hours doing exactly that. I was that lonely author.

Now, I will admit right up front that if not for Rachel and Krista coming in to visit with loved ones, and Bart and Dan coming into Chapters by chance but still stopping by to say hi, it would have been a lonely five hours.

That's not entirely true because Craig from Starbucks and the floor staff of Chapters all came by to welcome me and chat and find out a little more about my 'baby', so I certainly felt like I belonged.

But what I wanted to get into here is the surprisingly varied denizens of a big=box, chain bookstore (this is a description, not an insult to Chapters-Indigo) who drifted past my station during the course of my time there. Right off the bat let me say that the visitors who brought the most joy were the children. My hat is off to the very pretty mother who entered with her young daughter and explained "Now, Sweetie, we're only buying two books today. One for you to read and one for me to read to you." Wow. In this digital world filled with freaks from the mePod generation, to find a mom who loves and respects her child enough to not only read to her and encourage her to read, but also to explain things calmly and lay out her expectations for their little adventure.
The there was the full-tilt excitement of the kids who cleared the stores double-door entrance , wriggled free of mom or dad's loving grasp and made a giggling bee-line for the children's book section at the back of the store. The unbridled joy as they galloped, loped or skipped past me was fresh air, sunshine and fabric softener all bundled up in Gap Kids-clothed packages. It makes me want to finish writing my children's books just so I can share in that joy.
Others observed during my meet-the-public time included those who smiled on their way past with a book-finding mission on their minds and the don't-talk-to-strangers strangers who avoided eye contact and in fact detoured around me and my wares. There were couples who separated briefly only to drift back together at one display or another to share their discoveries with each other, eliciting shock, surprise, pleasure, hesitation and even indifference. This last emotion was seen most when they were buying a gift for a third party and not really knowing much more about the person other than the fact that they once saw them read a book so they must love reading enough to love all books.

There were the magazine buyers who never even gave the books a second glance, the skulkers voted most likely to shoplift and the visitors most in need of the toilet facilities sort of behind Starbucks. There were cute faces that shone and cute souls that shone through; crying babies and pretty ladies; the lonely aisle wanderers for whom this was the highlight of their weekend, the just-here-for-my-Starbucks-fix passersby and there were the smart bibliophiles who got their half-caf-decaf-with-a-shot before making their way along the highways and biways in search of hidden literary treasures.

There were the meeters who were meeting someone and had time to kill so they wandered around for thirty minutes, waiting for a cover to catch their eye or their cellphone to ring out and tell them that rescue was at hand.

And finally, there was the mother whose three-year-old daughter asked what the glass wine decanter was for and was told by mom that "It's for putting yucky drinks into." Was mom a teetotaller who strongly disapproved of fermented imbibing, or was she being a bit of an alarmist and trying to discourage her three-year-old from trading her drinkin' box for an Andre's cellar cask? Whichever it was, it was all part of the entertaining experience of being a published author on display for public viewing at a bookstore. I look forward to the next time, which I believe is Saturday, October 25th, again at Dalhousie Station Chapters in Calgary, Alberta. Come on by and say 'hi'.

Ciao for now.

(By the way, I sold eight books that day. Not bestseller stuff, but eight more than if I'd just stayed home and cut the lawn.)

Cheers,

Tim Reynolds.
Author of Stand Up & Succeed
www.StandUpAndSucceed.com