The Phoenix metro area has a morning radio personality with a very strange name. Broomhead. Yes. Broomhead.
Mike Broomhead is (as I told his former program director when he was part time) close to the best modern day AM morning show talk host in any radio market. Period. He needed to be the morning man at Phoenix AM 550 KFYI. Simple. And he got the job. (Yeah yeah yeah my background in radio qualified me for that statement having been a morning ‘man’ quite a few times!)
Mike does not shy away from dealing with logical topics in a logical way. He’s an electrician by trade, as far as I know and that is not a wishy washy profession.
For whatever reason (and being I Heart Radio I can think of quite a few clear channel reasons to get OUT) KFYI and Mike parted company recently. He wound up (as it seems most former KFYI morning hosts do) across town and on FM at 92.3 KTAR. One of my other Phoenix market faves did the same move. Jim Sharpe. I have no idea where he is now. But I digress.
This morning Mike brought up the topic of the title.
Municipalities across the country are reaching for solutions to the symptoms they see in their society. They are on the verge or have already passed local ordinances to keep you, yes you from hurting yourself.
You know that started on the playgrounds. Poor kids playing, falling, getting scrapes, cutting things. So. Liberal educators moved in to smother the children with protection and in the process removed the joy of growing up.
Now the topic is cell phones. You should not be texting or talking on a cell phone while driving. Well. That’s sort of a societal protection issue. After all: your texting while driving most likely will hurt SOMEONE ELSE too. Laws are made to protect the ‘someone else’s of the society. Any laws passed to protect the someone from their own caused injury is not a government function. It is a parental function but more than that: it has a cause.
Mike talked about a specific city (who cares which one and I don’t remember anyway) working on a no texting and walking law.
Walking while texting tends to involve only the person walking. That person could be texting or thinking or neither and still walk into a street lamp. It is not what you are doing or not doing that controls whether you are aware of your surroundings. It is your level of self-awareness and no law can change that.
Society has to change that. Society has to stop the reversal of evolution in humans and there is a simple and very effective way to do that. Education of the right process. Teach people, the younger the better: to be aware of their own existence. It leads to finding the place that existence is in. That leads to knowing yourself and that ends depression, suicidal thoughts and dangerous reactions.
Bring awareness to people that they need to increase their self-awareness.
That is easily done. See this article for how.
Those who refuse to learn or even pay attention to know they have to learn are not going to change. Leave them alone.
Then cities and states and even the meddling federal government will stop trying to re-engineer the human condition. As those people become more self-aware they will feel less need to control others.
Bullies control others because they cannot control themselves.
A politician seeking to pass laws to punish people for not taking care of themselves is in worse awareness condition than the people are.
Remember: if a person can text and walk and run into a pole that same person can react dangerously to any negative stimuli. Learning self-awareness not only stops the reversal of human evolution it restarts it forward and will result in a return to civility, a massive reduction in emotionally caused crimes and a drop in prison population.