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Full tilt – blindfolded

November 15, 2019   ·   0 Comments

By Constance Scrafield

I spent a lot of time driving in downtown Toronto last week and it was pretty strange what people become behind the wheel. 

Not a new thought, to be sure. We’ve been using automobiles as murder weapons forever. 

A person could understand the misguided, who rush from lane to lane, on highways, mad -cap – weaving, passing on every side, skittering by and cutting off large trucks, making those drivers wish they’d simply stayed in bed. 

There’s lots of room on a highway but when they start all that on a narrow stretch of two city lanes with plenty of other vehicles in the way – yes, it’s a thrill to watch and make bets with yourself about his getting away with it. There are still many courteous drivers that stop and let the fool go. Well, they beep their horns in objection.

The cyclists are even more thrilling. There they go, too often flashing in front of you, with little regard for their own safety – in the depth of the darkest night, in their darkest, black clothes, on dark bicycles, many with no lights. Some have those little flashing red lights on the front on their handlebars or on the back on their heels. Those are the tiniest hint that someone is there on the road ahead of you because the clothes and the rest are black. 

The big fear is hitting one.

Where I’m going with all this is to wonder what the hurry is – what do we really gain? What are the benefits of crashing ahead only to be caught by the inevitable jam just up the road?

How did we let the tech world convince us that faster and super faster is better? 5G is coming and there may be real reasons why it should not. Several countries in Europe are saying no to it. The science on the harm of so much radiation and so many antennae being used is incomplete, although many scientists have raised alarms at the rush to proceed without more clarity. They show evidence of the serious possibilities of cancer, infertility and many, many other harmful effects on all life here, including, obviously, wildlife and domestic animals.

Once again, we are in too much of a hurry and this is our history of, in particular, the last couple of centuries. Every shiny new thing we invent, we are in such a hurry to get it out there and use it without doing our due diligence as to what the other side of the coin is. As a consequence, we have just about ruined our home planet. 

So, here we are again, rushing forward before we really understand the whole picture. Hurry is necessarily harmful.

The shiny side of the coin, for its advocates, is the increase in interconnectedness of the whole world, a farmer to his fields, the lost corners of the planet, tiny communities in remote areas. This is part of the positive spin given from those promoting 5G.

The real trouble with it, as with all super powerful inventions, is that it is not truly understood and that there is, once again, too much to gain for those at the top of our pile, for 5G to go away any time soon.

Once again, it is all about speed: the speed at which information can be acquired or shared. How fast you can check on your Facebook buddies. How fast your life can be exposed whether you want it to be nor not.

That is already a problem of how we are spied on and chased and watched every second of everything we do. Now, with the conversation and planning for Sidewalk Toronto, which will be built by Google and feature an intensity of data collecting, the like of which is nearly science fiction. There is talk and hand patting about the integrity and respect for privacy that is positively laughable.

This is simply a repetition of everything we have been doing all along. 

Already, the advantages of 5G have not been missed by the military and the possibility of interference by governments meddling in other countries. That is already a online problem. The tangled web of the internet – can it ever be untangled?

Would that we were in such a hurry to club together as a nation planet with a single intent, to cleanse our beautiful planet. That we struggle on every level with this is a tragedy. That we focus on anything else is terrifying. 

If only we could stop grasping for profit and stop fighting for power over each other; if only we could take our wonderful inventiveness, the power of our collective intellect and turn it toward the urgent needs of our Earth, one species saving all the others, that would be worthy of us, as the family of humanity.

Let’s save our home and think about slowing down enough to enjoy it.

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