No Stone Left Unturned

Monday, November 1, 2004, 5:52pm

This afternoon’s 5:30 Worcester local adds seven stops to my usual commute – three each in Newton and Wellesley plus one in downtown Natick. Through an evening made blacker by the changing of the clocks yesterday it will be a solid hour-long ride to Ashland. Except on Thursdays when I ride the 4:10pm train, I won’t be seeing any daylight on my ride home again until March or April.

“West Newton, next stop.”

“West Newton next.”

This afternoon across the Fort Point Channel under the deep twilight of my walk to South Station I was feeling the weight of my day pack and took an inventory of the electronic gadgets in my possession – this laptop computer, a mouse, 3.3 mega-pixel Casio digital camera, AA battery charger and four extra batteries, noise canceling headphones and ‘backup’ ear buds, AM-FM walkman style radio, and cell phone.

A while ago I’d also mounted a pair of omni-directional condenser microphones to the sides of my pack, collecting audio with a hand-built microphone preamplifier that fed uncompressed signals into a hand-held MP3 recorder. For about six months I recorded ambient train and city noise useful for my Thief designs – and wound up with perhaps twelve hours of playable audio in all. When it comes to machine noises, the railroads are a gift from the gods.

But I don’t do that anymore, mostly because of how I’ve collected far more sound than I could ever use, and partly because I grew concerned about the excuses I might need to invent if ever challenged by a curious security guard.

“Wellesley Hills”

This is the local train all right, though so dark outside that I’d be hard pressed to identify any of these stops without an announcement.

“Wellesley Square, next stop.”

The national election happens tomorrow, and all indications point to another mess up with ballots given how four years of talk mixed with fours years of foot dragging have resulted in little improvement in the quality of our voting system. Most people are hoping for a definitive decision that eliminates the need to challenge every hanging chad, and at this point I really don’t care who wins because either man will be boxed in by events beyond his control. Mr. Bush will be the man with an Iraqi quagmire and Mr. Kerry with an Iraqi albatross, and neither will govern effectively given these divisive times overall. In either event, because we still have the right to decide, we will most certainly wind up with the government we deserve – a notion I did not invent, yet so true, so true.

Even though both parties claim they would create a safer country, this is not possible because this very second we do not know the actual threat. Anyone can conjure endless doomsday scenarios, but this is merely our own imagination at play – just like how my dad created ‘counter surveillance’ systems assuming the Soviets knew everything we knew about camouflage plus everything we could guess that they might have invented. Only later did he find out what had mattered and what didn’t, and how much effort and money we’d wasted swatting windmills.

Without knowing the true dimensions of a danger it is impossible to know if I am any safer no matter how I prepare for what lies ahead. Whether the goal is being safer or simply feeling safer – either way before I can act effectively I must know more about dangers truly faced – or more realistically learn to live amidst the largely unknowable.

The key to overall safety is not in spending trillions on amorphous dangers. For example, in 2001, the year of the 9/11 attacks, the same number of people in this country died as a result of falls on level surfaces in their homes as died in the lofty twin towers of the World Trade Center. Will this nation spend a trillion dollars in the next four years helping people to live more safely inside their own homes?

Of course not.

But like Don Quixote we will spend that much chasing ghosts and phantoms in Iraq and elsewhere.

I’m not against minimizing amorphous risks. A sensible effort is warranted even if we’re mostly guessing at the right solutions. Yet, given the data, it appears that Osama and like-minded ‘evil doers’ are a drop in the bucket compared to the dangers we routinely face, and frankly they don’t deserve this much attention.

Unfortunately with great unknowns waved in our face daily by vote-grubbing politicians and news media alike, our collective notion of risk has gone into a zombie-like state and I’m curious why we’ve so easily succumbed to the obvious madness.