PAY ATTENTION! -- LETTER FROM THE EDITOR 2/20/08
Two red-coated Ski Patrollers brought the sled to the door of their building, calling out in that hurried, not-quite-panicked tone, "We've got to get him inside, quick." The uniformed fire marshal stepped briskly to the edge of the asphalt landing pad and waited. Within minutes, the thud, thud, thud of a helicopter could be heard, and the black dot in the sky grew larger and landed, spraying blinding gusts of snow.
As the small body was loaded into the chopper, I wondered: could that be the kid who had been skiing down sidehills across a thickly populated, but narrow run? The kid who was doing it without looking out for traffic below him, who would have collided with me if I hadn't been able to evade his unexpected swoop over the trail, who continued to do it despite yells from myself and other near-victims?
Was it the kid who had been paying no attention at all to anyone outside his own internal world?
That morning, I had escaped another near collision. A car traveling up the crowded road to the resort was going much slower than the flow of traffic. I signaled to pass, then looked over at a woman who was looking down, and not at the road. She was obviously texting, and hoping that if she went slow enough, nothing would change in the space ahead of her. Luckily, I pulled back. The guy behind me didn't. He signaled to pass, pulled in front of the texting road-ignorer, and promptly got rear ended by her sudden change in speed.
Her inattention probably ruined his day.
But there seems to be a national epidemic of not paying attention. The man walking forward while looking sideways at a shop window trips over a stroller in front of him. The kid who runs backward on a busy sidewalk, paying no attention to others until he collapses against a very pregnant woman, making her wince. And the parent? The mom wasn't looking at her kid or at the sidewalk, because she was talking into her cell phone.
I once had a friend named Max whose constantly repeated mantra was "Pay attention!" He would say it every time he noticed someone being careless of the here and now; someone daydreaming and stopped while standing in a checkout line, or a group standing and talking without even noticing that they were blocking a door or a stairway. Max was greatly annoyed by inattentiveness, and felt it his job to constantly remind people to "Pay attention!" I laughed at him then.
His mantra came long before cell phones and Ipods, technology which allows people to shut out the world they are moving through and place their attention somewhere else.
Of course, doing that doesn't make much sense. The world is pretty tangible; and the corner of the coffee table that Joe is walking towards while looking across the room at the TV will hit him in a very vulnerable part of his knee, causing several days of think-about-it pain. But will Joe really think about looking in the direction he is walking from now on?
Don't bet on it.
We have gotten out of the habit of paying attention; perhaps because our attention is overwhelmed with the noise and visual distractions of so many people trying to sell us something. So the noise gets louder to get attention, and now even TV shows have a constant noisy background racket of exciting crescendos and clashes.
There are many problem results from our distraction; some more important than incresingly pumped up noise and flashing lights or even road accidents and injury. It's easy to lie to people who aren't paying attention. You can say almost anything to them, and they will believe it. You can spend incredible amounts of taxpayer money and get away with it, because no one is paying enough attention to check where the money is going; and the warning voices of those who have checked it out are mere whispers in the wind to which the masses pay no attention.
Of late, I have begun to think Max was a wise man, and I am now imitating him. "Pay attention!" I say to the person with the large backpack, who is hitting people every time she turns her shoulders. "Pay attention!" I say to the kid jumping into puddles and splashing people around him. "Pay Attention!" I scream to the driver pulling out of an alley, who is looking for an opening in traffic, but not at the sidewalk, where I am on my bike.
"Pay attention!" All of us. "Pay attention!"
Wina Sturgeon, Editor