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The human factor in a tragedy

Like most men of his generation – born shortly before the Depression and coming of age during World War II – my father always tended to see things in stark shades of black and white, the middle ground full of its shades of grey being a wast

Like most men of his generation – born shortly before the Depression and coming of age during World War II – my father always tended to see things in stark shades of black and white, the middle ground full of its shades of grey being a wasteland of lost souls where weak people who couldn’t make up their minds wallowed pointlessly.

I believe he worried a great deal about my well-being and what kind of person I’d grow up to be but I’m pretty sure the concept of my self-esteem was well off his radar. This isn’t an indictment; to the best of my knowledge, the concept of self-esteem hadn’t even been invented and its overriding importance in the voodoo world of pop psychology was yet to be postulated.

Like every other father I knew, he felt it was his duty to explain in no uncertain terms the difference between right and wrong and, if necessary, punctuate the lesson with a briskly applied palm to my offending backside. I’m certain he didn’t consider it abuse or violence but something more along the lines of a memory association trick.

It worked. Whenever I thought of doing whatever I’d gotten swatted for, I tended to avoid doing it again. Besides, there were so many other transgressions to ferret out, so many bold new mistakes to make, why be derivative?

The only other tenet of personal philosophy he felt it was his fatherly duty to pass along was a sense of personal responsibility. Now, this concept is much trickier to both teach and learn. It requires leading by example and driving home a point by means other than direct application of power. And, truth be told, it runs against the grain of human nature.

Given a choice, very few of us want to be responsible. We’d rather someone else clean up our messes, take our blame, bear our consequences and pay our debts. It has always been thus.

Many years ago, long before people wore swank clothes, drove fast cars or skied at number one resorts, life was tougher. In fact, life was such a tribulation, some people decided it would be a whole lot nicer if they had an easy way to absolve themselves of blame for the frequent woes visited upon them. Looking around for some simpler way out than suffering the consequences of their screw-ups, they came up with a grand ceremonial scheme.

On what came to be called the Day of Atonement, they would drag two unsuspecting goats before the high priest. At the altar of the tabernacle, the high priest would cast two lots before the goats, one for the Lord, with whom I assume you’re all at least passingly familiar, and one for Azazel, let’s call him the villain of the piece.

The goat hit by the first lot won, so to speak. It was sacrificed and reputed to be very tasty, roasted carefully over a burning bush. The unfortunate goat struck by the second lot had all the sins of the priest and all the sins of the people transferred onto it. It was then led to the "land not inhabited" and set free to, ostensibly, wander the wilderness until it and its baggage of sins died a vanquished death.

The second goat was called the scapegoat. It was the embodiment of our human desire to duck responsibility and without it, modern life would be an absolute bitch.

Scapegoats are undeniably handy things to have around. They play to all our higher human instincts to avoid personal fault and not unduly burden someone else with it lest we take a turn ourselves. They help in the search for an explanation of the inexplicable.

They also lead to some very bad decisions.

Last weekend, seven people died on the highway just north of Squamish. Though probably not a lot of us knew them personally, their deaths touched us. Word of the accident spread through the village like wildfire and long before the day was out, everywhere we went there were reverent conversations about it.

The loss of humanity touched us but more fundamentally, we all knew it could have been any one of us. We’d all dodged that bullet.

You don’t have to drive the Sea-to-Sky Highway very many times to feel like you’ve narrowly missed a date with destiny. The drive is fraught with perils. Some of them are engineering mistakes, some of them are related to the neverending construction, many are weather related.

But all of them, at their root, are based in human mistake. Inattention, bad judgment, negligence, malice, all come into play and all lie at the heart of the recurring tragedies.

In the wake of last week’s crash, the scapegoats have been herded up and paraded for the press. Speed limits too high, traffic too voluminous, Whistler employers too uncaring to provide transportation for night workers too exhausted to safely drive home, a community so astronomically expensive it can’t house the people it needs to make it run.

Sorely missing is any voice asking, "How did this accident happen? Who wasn’t paying attention? What can we learn?"

This accident didn’t happen during a raging blizzard. Black ice wasn’t involved. There were no dangerous, off-canted blind corners. Traffic wasn’t merging. No one was making a risky left turn against on-coming traffic.

The road was straight, conditions were clear, the day had dawned, the speed limit was 80 km/h.

Somebody screwed up.

For maybe a fraction of a second, somebody forgot their responsibility, forgot they were hurtling through space in a couple of thousand pounds of steel and plastic, forgot Newton’s law about bodies in motion.

Maybe a cellphone rang. Maybe a cigarette was dropped. Maybe a song needed changing. Maybe sleep overtook wakefulness. Maybe… maybe….

But it wasn’t the road. It wasn’t the speed limit. It wasn’t the traffic. It wasn’t a lack of public transportation. And it wasn’t too few affordable houses in Whistler.

It was what we are. Human, fallible, reckless, negligent, loving, caring, irresponsible, diligent, brilliant, stupid people.

We can build better highways and safer cars. We can promulgate Alpine Rules of Safety and wear helmets. We can forbid schools from taking backcountry trips and we can bomb hell out of snowy slopes.

But we can’t change the fundamental nature of what we are.

As long as people do something more than sit at home with their hands folded safely in their laps, mistakes will be made and death will ensue. We can grieve for the dead, comfort the survivors, try and learn from our mistakes and preach safety to the deaf but we can’t rewire humans to keep them from screwing up.

It’s part of what we are.