A lust for an overseeing eye
Another thing that came up during the driving class thingy was something I've been pondering a bit. The instructor asked us what we would do to improve compliance with traffic laws - a fantasy budget, so make up whatever crazy thing you wanted. And a bunch of people - most of them part of the group of older women, but not all, there was definitely a young dude who was invested in this - were all really in favor of more surveillance. Red light cameras, cameras at intersections, cameras in your car, black boxes in your car to record everything. And they were all convinced that it would, in all cases, help them prove that somebody else caused the accident/was at fault. Nobody pondered the idea that they all had pretty much admitted to routinely speeding, even if it was just five or so miles...no big deal.
There was also a brief flurry of discussion about police discretion - one teenage girl said that she had been pulled over for doing eight miles over, and her friend, who was going fifteen miles over, got away with only a warning and OMG not fair. The instructor asked if they would change things so police couldn't use their discretion - if you get caught doing two miles over at midnight on a deserted interstate, they would be forced to write you a ticket just as if you were doing 50 over in a school zone at three in the afternoon. Some people agreed on the grounds of "it's only fair." After a certain point, everybody walked themselves back from that cliff slightly, and agreed that perhaps people should simply be required to take driving tests every few years to make sure their skills hadn't deteriorated. This branched out into "old people shouldn't drive/young people shouldn't drive" and temporarily divided the class (there were very few inbetweenies like me, most of the people were either teenagers or women in their 60s, strangely).
It was an interesting discussion to listen in on. Nobody sat up and said, "You know, I'd rather there were not constant surveillance everywhere I went, it's creepy and I don't like it."
Comment here or at http://sienamystic.dreamwidth.org/436924.html.
There was also a brief flurry of discussion about police discretion - one teenage girl said that she had been pulled over for doing eight miles over, and her friend, who was going fifteen miles over, got away with only a warning and OMG not fair. The instructor asked if they would change things so police couldn't use their discretion - if you get caught doing two miles over at midnight on a deserted interstate, they would be forced to write you a ticket just as if you were doing 50 over in a school zone at three in the afternoon. Some people agreed on the grounds of "it's only fair." After a certain point, everybody walked themselves back from that cliff slightly, and agreed that perhaps people should simply be required to take driving tests every few years to make sure their skills hadn't deteriorated. This branched out into "old people shouldn't drive/young people shouldn't drive" and temporarily divided the class (there were very few inbetweenies like me, most of the people were either teenagers or women in their 60s, strangely).
It was an interesting discussion to listen in on. Nobody sat up and said, "You know, I'd rather there were not constant surveillance everywhere I went, it's creepy and I don't like it."
Comment here or at http://sienamystic.dreamwidth.org/436924.html.