Glob-a-log

(Pesky aliens again…)

Ah well, people can be such idiots. A few weeks ago it was UFOs eating wind turbines:

“A family has described seeing tentacled flying objects in the night sky just days before a wind turbine was supposedly wrecked by similar looking UFOs. The group said they watched several glowing orange spheres with octupus-like arms reaching down from them, while driving late at night. The sighting came just three days before a wind turbine had one of its blades ripped off in Conisholme, Lincs, in what many believe was a close encounter. And the family’s description is strikingly similar to what witnesses claim they saw shortly before the wind farm incident on January 4.”

‘Strikingly similar’, indeed. Poor wind turbine.

Anyway, man can not live on aliens alone, so now it’s back to that other old favourite, things that go bump in the night:

“A hospital has called in an exorcist after staff claimed they were being haunted by a ghost. Staff at Derby’s new City General claim a black-clad figure wearing a cloak is stalking the corridors and wards. Senior manager Debbie Butler has now reportedly briefed the terrified employees via email, explaining that they have hired an exorcist to come and rid the £334 million hospital of their unwanted visitor. She explained: “I’m not sure how many of you are aware that some members of staff have reported seeing a ghost. I’m taking it seriously as the last thing I want is staff feeling uneasy.”"

God forbid.

You wouldn’t want the type of personnel that normally can’t bother to remember washing their hands in between seeing patients to feel uneasy about ghosts wandering through their decidedly unclean wards.

It may seem somewhat strange to worry about the unquiet dead, while so many patients are still dying, quite needlessly, from those hospital bugs but then again, those bugs are smaller than the eye can see, while people will, most probably, never stop reporting having seen ghosts.

Anyway, both these stories serve well enough as metaphors - or as illustrations of what’s wrong with us, humans.

You would think it would make more sense to send in some engineers than to shout ‘Aliens!’ when a wind turbine suddenly collapses and most sane people would have thought that, in your average hospital, it would be wise to reinstall old-fashioned matrons to keep an eye on procedures, to improve your cleaning services and even get in a few good rat catchers before you’d make that call to the ghostbusters.

When you look at the world’s more serious problems though and, more pertinently, the way we respond to them, from environmental to geopolitical problems, from ethical questions to religious and cultural dilemmas, you could argue that the main reason that we mess up things so badly is that we do have this endearing but not very helpful habit to respond to most crises by crying ‘Aliens!’ or ‘Ghosts!’, instead of trying to find a more rational approach.

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This entry was posted on Friday, January 30th, 2009 at 14:36 and is filed under Columns, Satire, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.