Check Your Blind Spots

 

Everyone who bikes regularly invariably has one or more scary incidents, which they hopefully live to tell about with little to no damage to life or property. One of mine, a relatively harmless one thankfully, involves racing down the street perpendicular to the Market-Frankford elevated line in West Philadelphia to make it through an intersection before the light turned red. I was even with and close to a car on my left, so while I had it in my mind that I could make the light, I also wanted to make sure I steered clear of this car that was trying to do the same. So I slowed to let it get ahead of me and put some distance between me and this two-ton steel box. But then it slowed too. So I slowed some more. Only to have it slow some more. And which point, somewhat suddenly and without using a turn signal, it swerved to its right and clipped me. Somehow I fell gracefully even though I’m usually pretty clumsy, and popped back up, just as the driver got out of the car, put her hands on her head, and said with panic, “oh my gosh, I didn’t see you, I’m so sorry!” 

This obviously could’ve been a lot worse, so I’m grateful I could emerge with a few scrapes and a vivid story. But the possibility of tragedy is amplified by the fact that the person at fault, the driver who did not see me, obviously did not intend to harm me. She simply did not see me and so took actions that were innocent to her but dangerous to me. If I had been more seriously hurt, I suppose I could’ve been upset that she was not more careful to check her blind spot. But I could not hold it against her that she was being malicious or hateful. The point I'm making, in this thankfully non-existent parallel situation, is that that wouldn’t have mattered, because I would’ve still been injured or worse. 

I think about metaphoric blind spots all the time. How many times are we driving down the lane of life, meaning no harm to others and yet taking actions that, because of our not having checked our blind spots, are putting others in peril, and perhaps causing them great and even grievous damage? 

In another context, it has been said that the most important things to mind are “the unknown unknowns,” or to elaborate, “we don’t know what we don’t know.” This saying was first used in a military intelligence setting, and it informed both what needed to be done to collect more information and how to think about the information we already did have. Meaning that, we know what we know, and we know what we don’t know, but we must understand that there is more to the world than just that, because there are things we don’t know, and we don’t know that we don't know them, and those are the very things that are harder to figure out and plan for and are therefore potentially most damaging to us. 

In a time of war, collecting intelligence and making decisions is literally life and death, so people are sober and thorough in response. For the rest of us civilians going about our day, we can find ourselves being oblivious to our blind spots. And, the fact that we don’t know they exist and we don’t know what they are is made worse by the fact that we often don’t care. Imagine, for example, the driver that clipped me, only her swerving caused me real damage. And, imagine, even worse, that after hitting me, she either saw and didn’t care or didn’t see and therefore had no reason to care, and after all that just drove off. According to our sensibilities and the laws on our books, that would literally be criminal. 

And yet we do this all the time in our lives, which is to harbor blind spots, and even worse, to do nothing to acknowledge their existence let alone change our angle of sight to see if there is anything in those blind spots that is in harm’s way. We may actually then do harm and not see or not care or both. And we do this over and over again, or at least I know I do. 

Perhaps this is a dated analogy, since newer cars have safety measures to mitigate against blind spot problems, like special cameras and beeping lights. But perhaps the analogy still holds: we have become more sophisticated as we travel through life, and it gives us a false sense that we no longer have any blind spots because we have rigged our metaphorical cars in ways that render it impossible to plow over someone without seeing them. And yet we continue to have blind spots, put people in harm’s way, and care not that we are complicit. 

If you’re wondering why I work so hard to expose myself to people different from me and then really try to understand and appreciate the different perspectives that they hold because of those differences, it is because I know I have blind spots and I can therefore harm others around me unknowingly. I may think that my vehicle is blind spot proof, but it is not. For example, my social circle is racially diverse, and while I am pretty well off I certainly don’t wall myself off in upper crust enclaves where my only social interactions are in high-power boardrooms and fancy country clubs. But that does not mean I can even get close to empathizing with the life experience of the typical Philadelphian. I may have seen all the shoes out there, but I have walked a mile in a very small subset of them! 

Sorry to mix metaphors but hopefully you get my point. I am like that driver who clipped me, going about my daily business with no desire to harm others around me but also with insufficient awareness of the existence of those around me. It takes work to check for blind spots. But they do exist, and so we must if we want to do right by our fellow man.