Anachronistic Icons
Copyright Sandy Long
The definition of anachronism is: a person or a thing that is chronologically out of place; especially: one from a former age that is incongruous in the present. Old hand drivers like me are becoming the anachronism of trucking; we no longer fit the industry.
The image of the old time driver; that of being strongly independent, able to make decisions on their own, able to work without constant supervision was true and necessary to the way trucking used to be. Truckers had to be independent and able to make decisions and work without supervision because there was no technology around to do this for them.
We were the captains of our own ships and had no one to hold our hand except for the occasional call to dispatch or to the shop if we broke down and could not fix the problem ourselves. That occasional call was not from a cell phone or satellite communication device either; to find a phone, one often had to hitch hike or walk then stand in line for an available pay phone.
What made us icons that were featured in movies and glorified us and the trucking industry is now our down fall. No longer is what made the old time driver special or unique now wanted or necessary; we old hands have to adapt now or leave trucking itself.
Where once individual independence was looked for in a driver, now drivers who can fit into a business model of cookie cutter drivers who all drive the same, use the same technology and who can fit into a mold are wanted. Today’s generation of drivers are trained to use satellite systems that tell them where to load, fuel, and stop to sleep and where and when to deliver the load. The only individuality that is overlooked is that of what a driver wears or how they look. Companies no longer care much about those things as they once did except now if one is too fat or has a too high BMI, some will not hire the driver.
Today’s drivers at most companies cannot talk to a dispatcher and develop a relationship with them. Dispatch is just the fingers on the keys of the computer and the driver is just the person in the seat. If there is a problem serious enough for a driver to have to call in on a landline or cell phone, there is no personal touch anymore. Lord help the driver that tries to stand up for what is right and tries to speak to the higher ups in the company about it. They are automatically DAC’d or worse as ‘not complying with company policy’ or some other such black mark.
Instead of taking a real look at the driver in a personal way; the personnel office looks at a DAC report and decides whether to hire the driver or not. Get too many bad reports on DAC and you do not work for the company; no one asks what your side of the story is as they did in the past. Computer reports cannot lie or be wrong can they?
Back in the day, a long time driver was looked for and one that had longevity at a company was offered top dollar to come to work for another company. This year, a friend of mine with 20 years at one company and a clean record was told by 5 other companies when he was looking for a new company to work for, “you are too set in your ways to learn ours’ and was not even considered for a job.
Within the next year or so, black boxes will likely become standard equipment on trucks. These boxes will include electronic logging features. Drivers will become even more scrutinized than ever before with every stop questioned and recorded and they will be told where and when to do everything by an impersonal computer run by someone that doesn‘t know the driver.
In no way do I think that today’s and the future’s drivers are or will be bad; just different than we old hands are. That may or may not be a good thing; it depends on who or what a person is and thinks. Today’s drivers will perhaps have an easier time than we did in the past driving trucks with all the bells and whistles of modern technology. I sure hope so for their sakes.
I am not adverse to change if done for good reasons, but the changes go deeper in the near future of trucking. The changes coming go into who and what I am and how I am made as they do other old hand drivers still driving after years of service to the trucking industry. We could not have survived the early days of our careers as truckers by being other than what we are and how we are made. I wonder if we old hands will be able to survive and adapt to the new world of trucking as it comes or if we will be anachronistic icons only remembered in old movies as the strongly independent, unique individuals we are with the look of far horizons in our eyes. It remains to be seen.
This summer threw me completely off of track; two deaths of beloved family members in 3 months, my health going to crap, too many so-called friends deciding not to talk to me anymore, being dumped by a guy who had come into my life, slow freight and too much time off; all of this happened in three months; put my reasoning abilities in neutral for a while. I became obsessed with stupid people who I allowed myself to focus on to the detriment of myself and my reputation. Why did I do this…I had to think why I had and finally have it figured out with a little help from some friends.
Rusty Guns
{ November 30, 2009 @ 6:04 pm } · { political commentary }
{ Tags: ladytruckdriver, womandriver, sandylong, truckdriver, freelancewriting, trucks, femaletruckers, studentdrivers, ladytruckers, politics, responsibility, finance, rant, republican, democrate, revolution, gun control } · { Leave a Comment }
Rusty Guns Copyright Sandy Long
One of my favorite word pictures of any pro-gun ad is the one that says, “A gun can lie on a table until it rusts and will not harm anyone until someone picks it up and pulls the trigger.” Powerful word imagery that tells the whole story of gun crimes in a nutshell is it not. Anti gun lobbyists fuel their fight to increase laws that ban guns from citizen’s hands with junk science.
Laws have been passed recently to try to control the buying and selling of guns at gun shows and shops while ignoring the huge black market that exists where criminals can buy guns. The black market grows with every new law restricting gun ownership.
From the NRA: “The black market is responsible for the estimated 1 to 2 million guns illegally possessed by 8 million New York City residents, even after a century of punishing Sullivan Law licensing regulations.”
There has been a larger push to control supply-side support of the black market through pro-active police action and stricter licensing laws, citing some control in the short term in the black market sales of firearms in high crime areas of Chicago slums. Economist R. T. Naylor explained, “Never in history has there been a black market defeated from the supply side . . . .”
Supply-side controls, like the Sullivan Law’s handgun licensing requirement, merely serve to increase availability of, and profits from, the illegal item or service. Phillip J. Cook, an anti gun criminologist, wrote an article titled “Underground Gun Markets.” After publication, Cook and his researchers stated that their findings “stand in contrast to conventional wisdom in the sociology and criminology literatures . . . . There may remain some question whether our data are misleading.”
Cook, along with co-author Jens Ludwig wrote a book “Gun Violence: The Real Costs” In the book, they came up with supposedly accurate statistics about how much gun crime costs, $100 billion per year. Paul Gallant and Joann Eisen, authors of the book, “Post Heller Junk Science” explain how Cook and Ludwig came up with this figure. “To come up with this figure, they conducting a survey of 1,204 adults, they asked respondents if they would pay $50, or $100, or $200 in increased taxes in order to reduce firearm-related crime by 30 percent. They then extrapolated their figure to arrive at what the total number of households in the U.S. would be willing to pay to eliminate firearm-related violence by 100 percent. Adding in jury costs and other estimated costs; they came up with their huge cost of gun crimes.” Cook and Ludwig did admit that by coming up with that figure “they hoped that they would “provide some leverage in moving the policy debate ….”
New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) April 3, 2008, published an article by Dr. Garen J. Wintemute, an M.D. with a master’s in public health, entitled “Guns, Fear, the Constitution and the Public’s Health.” In the article, Wintemute used the statistic that, in 2005, 30,694 people “died from gunshot wounds.” Dr. Wintemute got this figure from the CDC. In the CDC’s June 28, 2006, National Vital Statistics Report: Preliminary Data for 2004 listed firearm-related homicides in the U.S. at 11,250 and firearm-related suicides at 16,603 (which is not about method, but motivation). By using the combined number, Wintemute maximizes the perceived danger firearms pose to society.
In an Oct. 7, 1993, NEJM article entitled “Gun Ownership as a Risk Factor for Homicide in the Home,” Dr. Arthur Kellermann and his co-authors stated, “keeping a gun in the home was strongly and independently associated with an increased risk of homicide. A gun kept in the home is far more likely to be involved in the death of a member of the household than it is to be used to kill in self-defense. In light of these observations and our present findings, people should be strongly discouraged from keeping guns in their homes.”
If one takes the time to read the complete study, one finds that approximately two-thirds of the offenders lived apart from the victims and more than likely brought the firearm to the scene of the crime. To slant their findings further, the authors counted both criminals and their prey as victims, even those “killed by police in the line of duty.” They even labeled four police officers as “offenders.”
Following the money trail behind why reputable scientists would slant findings like this, Kellermann received over $3 million in taxpayer money for numerous papers of this nature. Dr. Wintemute again got into the act over private gun ownership used in defense of the gun owner by disputing Gary Kleck’s 1995 research with Marc Gertz on the self-defensive use of guns. From the NRA: “ Wintemute claimed that Kleck’s figure of 2.5 million defensive gun uses (DGUs) was “too high by a factor of 10,” citing as the sole basis for his claim a research paper authored by anti-gun researcher Dr. David Hemenway, “Survey Research and Self-Defensive Gun Use: An Explanation of Extreme Overestimates.”
He (Wintemute) did not report that anti-gun criminologist Marvin E. Wolfgang wrote, in an article entitled “A Tribute to a View I Have Opposed,” “The methodological soundness of the current Kleck and Gertz study is clear. I cannot further debate it.”
“Guns do not kill people, people kill people” is another one of my favorite pro gun word pictures. It evokes the true picture of responsible gun owner ship and the role that guns play in criminal behavior. Anti gun lobbyists may win in the end but that will not keep guns out of criminal’s hands. Even if it did, when the common citizen no longer has the right to own a gun legally, the criminal can use a knife to commit his crimes, who is going to stop him, the victim with a rolled up newspaper?