A short time ago, a woman was traveling to New York with her four year old son, Edward Allen. When it came time to board the plane, the agent refused to let him board because he was on the government’s ‘no-fly’ list. Apparently, someone with the same name as young Edward, is on a government terrorist watch list, and it took a lot of pleading on his mother’s part and a call by the ticket agent, to get him on the plane. She encountered the same problem on their return flight, but finally the ticket agent said he would put them through although he seemed to have misgivings.

We have become a society that is afraid to take responsibility and to think for ourselves. As it turned out, the airline has a policy not to deny boarding to children under twelve or to subject them to additional security checks, even if their names match that of one on the list. Does a ticket agent need to know of such a policy or is this an instance where the little gray cells might be brought into play to recognize the absurdity of the situation?

For some unfathomable reason, many people view regulations from both private and public sector as inviolate, and as having been inscribed on a tablet and delivered to Moses, as was the Ten Commandments. These regulations are not pronouncements from on high, they are made by human beings with all the fallibilities that are ascribed to humans and sometimes they need a little interpretation or perhaps a curvature to make them fit. I’m not advocating running red lights or cutting up your seat belts but it wouldn’t hurt if parking meters had a little extra time built in, you know, like your insurance policy with its 30 day grace period, because you know the meter maid won’t care if you’re red faced, breathless and holding your shoe in your hand – rules rule!

What I find even more puzzling than many of the rules in themselves, is the rationale behind them. Blessings on the health insurance industry, including Medicare, which giveth and taketh away. These folks will fork over many bucks for catastrophic illness but nary a penny for preventive care. So are the folks who make these rules, stupid, penurious or just gamblers at heart? Or maybe they need a touch of the yiddisher cup my father always talked about.

Today, when you telephone a major corporation, chances are a robot will be at the other end of the line. That’s okay because your expectations will not be very high and you know that there’s not going to be any wriggle room. When you have a problem, and you get a real person at the other end, you expect that there will be some flexibility. That’s often a fallacy because these flesh and blood robots have been programmed not to have an independent thought and though you may have been through disaster, floods, deaths and whatever, rules, rule!

This lack of responsibility should not be too surprising because of the trickle down theory. No, this has nothing to do with economics, it’s the way the world seems to be run from the top. You no longer see signs proclaiming the buck stops here on the office walls of the powers that be. No, the new modus operandi is that the buck just passed by and you’d better get ready to duck.