Every now and then we all encounter absurdities in life when someone opposite our concerns or ideas shrugs his or her shoulders and says, “It’s not my problem.”

I spent some time in Downtown LA this week, explaining the role of operators behind the best detection equipment money can buy. It seemed that corporations prefer to spend fortunes on equipment, but not even a dime on preparing trained operators. The result is that everyone rolls the responsibility over, from management to the machine, on to the operator, and vice versa. I don’t want to label it “narrow-mindedness,” but if there is a hint of criticism in these lines, I hope I’ll be able to explain why.

I’ll start with an example. There are people who suffer from high levels of cholesterol. Yes, even here in America. I don’t want to get into the complications of high cholesterol levels, so we’ll just agree it’s not “fun.”

What can we do in order to lower the risk of high cholesterol complications? The simple way is by exercising, reducing our intake of high cholesterol foods, and maintaining a low-fat diet.

There is an even simpler way to lower cholesterol, which is taking a pill once a day. The market today is flooded with magic pills like these. If I begin taking this magic pill, why should I start wasting blood and sweat during fitness exercises? By taking the magic pill, am I forever banning fattening (and delicious) high cholesterol foods? No way!  Why should I?  That’s what the magic pill is supposed to prevent!

Would you be surprised if in the next check up doctors would find even higher cholesterol levels in my blood? This fact would not be in spite of the magic pill – it would be due to the magic pill. You see, the magic pill assists not only in reducing cholesterol levels – it helps in reducing the responsibility sense too. I can count on the pill to do the job for me; therefore, I can enjoy life’s tasty, fattening, and high cholesterol foods and continue on as if there was nothing I should worry about.

Here is another example. Almost everyone obeys traffic lights. The lights change both ways. Almost everyone stops when the traffic light is red, and almost everyone drives when the traffic light is green. The latter is problematic as some of us proceed when the traffic light is green--no matter what may be in their path! After all, the traffic light granted us the right-of-way. It doesn’t matter if the junction were not clear or if another driver did not obey his red light. The green is mine.

Decision makers found it much wiser to deploy a traffic circle in which drivers would grant the right-of-way to vehicles already in the circle. This way, the responsibility would be on the drivers and not on the traffic lights.

What connection do these examples have to the issues at stake? Right after 9/11 and its horrific outcome, everybody sought solutions on what to purchase. That was exactly what was received – products and machines. The operators of these machines immediately shook off their responsibilities. The machines showed green so there were no threats. Management reduced their responsibilities by purchasing even more machines, and so on and so forth.

To summarize my column with a story, I received a suspicious piece of information and was seeking an address in the dungeons of bureaucracy. I was transferred from an entity that has to do with federal security to an entity that has to do with border protection and immigration (because the bad guys are not in the US yet) and from them to an entity that supposes to ensures the nation’s safety and security (because it’s a matter of national security). It was not long until this entity sent me to another one that should deal with clandestine work (because the bad guys are residents of foreign countries and were not created in a vacuum). Needless to say, each entity closed the case to the best of its ability, simply by rolling over the responsibility to a different agency. Thank God, we have so many agencies…

Peace of mind.

Tomer Benito