The Panda and the Handicap Sign

This morning I was walking from the car to the office and I saw a young gal walking the other way. She was texting while walking and, as you can easily surmise, she walked straight into a metal post holding up a handicap parking sign. The sign wobbled back and forth in surprise clearly indicating that it was not its fault.

Now, logical thinking would suggest that this girl learn to not text while walking. If she had learned that lesson then I would not be writing this blog. Instead she kept right on texting and walked into the parking lot without looking for oncoming cars. Her collision avoidance still failed as she connected with a parked SUV.

She acted surprised, but the SUV didn’t really care.

There are no laws against walking and texting but there are laws against driving and texting, although some people use these as mere suggestions. Often I ride a city bus which puts me in a position to look into people’s cars as they drive by. Some days the number of people that are texting and driving seems to approach fifty-percent. There are Darwin Awardees that texted while driving his motorcycle, and even the case of a man texting while driving a motorcycle as he was being pursued by the police (see cite below). Perhaps he was contacting his lawyer.

Certainly, humans have an incredible need to communicate which each other. There are many cases of isolation leading to insanity in just a few days. Prisoners of war tapped on walls to communicate to prevent this insanity. We all have relatives that will not shut the hell up, because communications makes them feel relevant. Without communications we are not important.

Before texting, we could go hours without talking to someone and it did not cause the stress. We knew that sometime later in the day we would talk to someone and so our needs were satisfied. Nowadays, it seems that if we get more than 10 meters from our phones then anxieties appear. This is called ‘nomophobia.’ Just the other day I watched a teenage girl dance for joy because she had just returned from a youth group trip that did not allow phones. She was dancing for joy, not because she had a great time or met new friends, but because she got her phone back.

Why is it that we have become so tied to texting that we can’t stand being away from our phones?

Humans are designed for communications. When we talk to someone (remember talking?) we hear the words, see their actions , see their expressions and hear their intonations. This satisfies our requirements of communicating with others.

Texting is none of these things. Our needs are not fully met. Yet, we keep texting more and more even if it puts our lives and other people’s lives in jeopardy.

Perhaps, texting is like the Panda. This animal survives on bamboo which has very little nutrition, and so rather than finding a more nutritional food source they eat more and more bamboo. The same applies to texting. It does not satisfy our communication requirements. Instead of talking and seeing each other, we text even more and more to the point where we are walking into innocent handicap signs.

The real solution is to talk, look and listen.

Of course, I am guilty as well, as I am relaying these thoughts to you via a blog. However, I did this while sitting down instead of walking across the parking lot, and no humans were harmed during the creation of this blog.

[http://globalnews.ca/news/2255166/man-on-motorcycle-takes-both-hands-off-handlebars-to-text-during-high-speed-chase/] Accessed 29 October 2015.