scary things | Change Is Hard

June 18, 2015
by dawnkinster 18 Comments

Conflicted

Beauty at the end of an ugly day.

Conflicted isn’t even the right word for how I feel today. Maybe there is no word that accurately reflects my feelings, and perhaps the feelings of a good portion of the American population today. But I like to think I’d recognize the right word if I saw it.

I thought, for a moment, that I recognized it in President Obama’s statement when he paused and said that at some point we’d have to address how someone who wanted to do harm could so easily obtain a gun. There was anger there, and I too felt anger. But in an instant I knew that anger wasn’t the complete feeling. This time the gun was obtained legally by the father and given as a gift to his son, the shooter. I don’t know how gun control laws would have changed that.

Maybe the feeling was intense sadness. Not personal grief, nothing like the families in Charleston are going through now, but still intense sadness. And a feeling of familiarity because we’ve seen this before. And it all seems so senseless, so hopeless.

Maybe that’s it; maybe what I’ve been feeling all day is a hopelessness. There seems no solution. The 24 hour news talks about race relations and how it’s so much worse now than it was when the President was elected in 2008. How hate seems to be so much more blatant.

Still I circle back to the issue of guns. I’m no proponent of guns. I don’t have any experience with them, and frankly they scare me. But I agree that people have a right to have a gun. And I agree that it’s hard to tell when a person is carrying evil or craziness or a combination inside themselves. This shooter exhibted signs, the news says, signs someone should have noticed.

Yet his father gave him a gun for his birthday.

I don’t know who is more crazy, the young man who committed the unthinkable last night, or the father who didn’t pay attention to the signs. The combination was lethal.

We need to open a dialog about guns and mental health. But if this country could not make progress on settling gun control or mental health issues after the 2012 massacre of more than two dozen innocent people in Sandy Hook what makes us think that we can have a relevant discussion now? When will it be bad enough for us to recognize that we have to sit down, throw out the politics, and talk.

So I’m back to anger. Maybe that’s what we all need to feel. Anger that it was so easy for the shooter to get a gun, so easy for him to kill innocents. Anger that we don’t have adequate mental health programs. Anger that we continue to cry and rant but don’t resolve. Anger that people’s lives are being lost while the politicians use this and other similar tragedies to support their own, preexisting stances which are bought and paid for by special interests.

Anger tinged with intense sadness, shadowed with hopelessness. That’s what I feel as the sun sets on a long and tragic day. How about you? What dialog are you willing to start or become involved in? What word accurately describes your feelings about all of this?

Let’s talk about it.

June 3, 2015
by dawnkinster 12 Comments

Assault on safety

Most of you know that my dad was killed by a tired trucker in 2004, and that since then I’ve been working with the Truck Safety Coalition trying to make changes in the interest of safety.

Today there was a semi and tourist bus crash in Pennsylvania. At least 3 people on the bus are dead and more are injured, some critically. I usually like to reserve judgement until we know the cause, but photos seem to indicate the semi crossed the median and the tour bus struck the trailer of the semi in the center, breaking it in two. There are photos showing the dark gash through the median, the front of the bus buried inside what’s left of the semi trailer.

Multiple dead, multiple injured. People who were here from Italy just enjoying the sights on a beautiful day. And on this same beautiful day I received an urgent message from Truck Safety to call my House Representative because the trucking industry is leading a full assault on safety in the latest appropriations bill.

Among other things they want to take away funding for a study that will determine whether the current minimum liability insurance commercial carriers are required to carry should be increased. The minimum amount of insurance is $750,000. That hasn’t been raised or reviewed in over 35 years.

Think about medical expenses which have skyrocketed in the past 35 years. Then consider there hasn’t even been a cost of living increase.

Think, too, about multiple people injured in a crash who need intensive medical attention. Did you know all claims from a crash are paid from the total available liability insurance? So if the company has the minimum $750,000 of insurance, and there are, for example, four injuries or any other claims for that matter, they all split the total. The minimum won’t be nearly enough, and expenses over and above have to be covered by the families. And when the families run out of money taxpayers pick up the rest in the form of medicaid.

The trucking industry would rather all of us shoulder the cost of crashes caused by their race for profits.

So on this beautiful day people were killed and injured through no fault of their own. And at the same time Congress is getting ready to pass a bill that will gut our ability to even get the minimum insurance requirements studied. The trucking industry appears to be in charge of our Representatives.

But there’s an amendment that will negate the part of the bill which would defund the minimum insurance study. It’s called the Cartwright Amendment, and it will be voted on very soon, perhaps tonight, perhaps tomorrow. Possibly Friday.

Here’s how you can help.

Call or email your House Representative. You can find out who it is by going to this site and putting in your zip code. Tell your Member of Congress to vote for the Cartwright Amendment which will remove the provision to defund rulemaking on minimum insurance in the THUD Appropriations Bill. Tell them that minimum insurance that hasn’t been increased or even reviewed in 35 years is not acceptable. Tell them that anti-safe trucking measures don’t belong in an appropriations bill.

Tell them you care about safety on our roads. That you believe they should stand up for safety rather than profits.

You can make a difference.

Thank you.

Special Dad

February 26, 2015
by dawnkinster 10 Comments

Amy, I wish I’d met you

Amy. Twenty-seven, pretty, interesting, artistic, and by the looks of pictures on her Facebook page and blog, always smiling. I hear she was getting married in May. I never met her, never read her blog or asked her to friend me on Facebook. She was the friend and fellow blogger of a blogger friend of mine. Social media certainly makes the world smaller, and yesterday evening when my friend posted a short piece about Amy leaving a hole in her heart, about how she would be missing her friend, I wondered, so I clicked the link to Amy’s blog. There was a recent post and nothing seemed amiss. That made me wonder more so I started searching for information on Amy and her city. I found a short, one paragraph article about a six vehicle pileup with one fatality. A female.

And I knew.

Today, almost exactly 24 hours after that crash I read an article that included parts of the initial police report. All six vehicles were being merged into the left lane by State Police because of an accident up ahead. Amy was driving third in line behind two SUVs. There was a pickup behind her and behind that vehicle were two semi trucks. Amy and the two vehicles ahead of her had moved over to the left lane and slowed. The pickup behind her was in the process of moving over and had slowed. The semi behind the pickup tried to move over but couldn’t slow down fast enough, and hit the pickup, spinning it into the median. The semi behind the semi involved in the first crash hit that first semi, then slammed into Amy’s car, spinning it, then rammed into it again, on the driver’s side door, bounced off of her car, and hit each of the two vehicles ahead of Amy, then ran up an embankment and hit the bridge.

How fast do you think that second semi had to have been going to hit the first semi, Amy’s car twice, two other cars and still make it up the embankment to strike the cement bridge? It was snowing yesterday afternoon, terrible weather they say. I’m sure the truck drivers will use the weather card while explaining the reason they couldn’t control their vehicles. But these are professional drivers. We expect more from them. They, of all drivers, should know that bad weather requires everyone, especially big heavy trucks, to slow down. If that second truck had been going slower he might have run into the back of the first semi, but would he have hit Amy twice?

Amy, just like my father who was killed in a crash almost identical, absent the snow, did nothing wrong. She successfully slowed and merged. She had nowhere to go. She was killed because someone else made a mistake. And it’s a mistake that is happening across this country every single day. Four thousand people die in crashes with commercial trucks every year. Yesterday Amy was one of them.

I thought about Amy all day today. And as I drove home into a sky going purple with evening I thought about her family, her boyfriend, the wedding that won’t be, the future that ended so abruptly, the art she won’t make, the children she won’t have. I didn’t realize I was crying for her until I tasted my tears.

I became involved with the Truck Safety Coalition when my dad was killed. We offer comfort and information to families who have suffered the unthinkable. I know right now Amy’s family is reeling with grief. Her friends are in shock. Her fiance is in a black hole. I know this is not the time they want to think about what they should be doing to preserve evidence, what they will need to fight for justice for Amy. But they need to know. I wish I could hold them all in a big hug and gently help them through these first horrible days, weeks, months. Years.

I might never get to do that. But I do want them to know that when I’m working on these issues, when I’m in DC talking to elected officials and agencies and reporters I’ll be holding Amy in my heart right next to my dad. Amy has given me one more reason not to give up.

Amy. I wish I had met you. But you can be sure that I’m not going to forget you. The work we do to advance safety on our roads is done to honor Amy and my dad, and all the others killed and injured in crashes with commercial trucks. We are their voices and we are not going away.

Rest in peace Amy. The world is a little less special without you.

I can see that. Even though I never met you.

February 16, 2015
by dawnkinster 16 Comments

Just a thought.

Driving back from an appointment today, listening to news radio, I heard a piece on the dangers of TV binge watching. You know, the latest kick happening in the past couple of years of watching a whole series in one day or weekend. Sitting in front of the TV for hours at a time. The research, done by the University of Michigan, points out that binge watching is often associated with depression and can lead to obesity and heart disease similar to other bad habits including overeating.

I don’t think I’ve ever sat down and consciously watched a whole season of anything. But I do know this past snowy, cold, windy, nasty Saturday I lay on the sofa and watched several segments of “What Not to Wear” on TLC, back to back to back to…well…you know. I loved that show.

Anyway.

Right after the piece about the risks of binge TV watching was a very long advertisement read by one of the news anchors for Exfinity, a division of Comcast Cable. It was selling the app that would allow you to download all your favorite shows and movies so that you could watch anytime from anywhere even if you were offline. If you were traveling you could watch. If you were waiting somewhere you could watch. If you were bored with your dinner partner I guess you could watch.

Ironic. I wonder if program directors ever pay attention to what ads go where.

Apparently not.

February 2, 2015
by dawnkinster 25 Comments

When did it all get so scary?

Watching the snow fly.

It wasn’t so long ago that 14 inches (355.6 mm) of snow wouldn’t bother me. I lived in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan where that much snow was a regular thing. And I’ve done my share of commuting through blizzards over the years; I remember a few 4 hour drives to get home. I used to do that just because it was expected that you went to work. So you did.

Now? Not so much.

More and more people are able to work from home, hook into their work computers and be almost as, if not more, productive. So struggling with the car and the snowdrifts isn’t so normal any more. Still. Late yesterday afternoon and into the night I watched the snow pile up and worried about how I was going to get to work in the morning. I pictured the winding hilly roads I travel and imaged driving them with over a foot of snow on the ground. I strained to hear the sound of snow plows anywhere near my home, but failed to hear anything but the wind.

Driveway…early in the morning.

And this morning it was obvious that I wasn’t going anywhere, at least until I cleared the driveway of over a foot of snow. Even Katie didn’t want to go out there unless I made her a path first. Trust me I tried to get her to go without one. Complete failure.

Never mind, didn’t really need to go out anyway.

So I spent a couple of hours clearing the driveway and the road in front of my house. My two neighbors, both older men, cleared their sections of the road and helped me with mine. I began to feel guilty about not making an attempt to get to the office. But not one vehicle had been by and the people on the news said you needed 4 while drive. So I didn’t try.

Hunkered down like the juncos.

Later in the morning the sun came out, the sky was blue, the snow brilliant white. Beautiful. I felt brave and almost got in the car to head in to work. I wonder why I feel so much more brave in the bright light of sun than I do in the middle of the night’s darkness. And I wonder when I got scared to drive in the snow at all.

That’s better mama!

The news is still showing back roads covered in snow and saying you need 4 wheel drive to get out of subdivisions. A few more neighbors have plowed their portions of our road. Maybe I can get out of the subdivision tomorrow. Maybe people along the bigger side roads have plowed their own bits too. Maybe the county has done the paved roads.

Maybe it won’t be so bad. Maybe I can learn to relax and enjoy an unexpected day off instead of feeling guilty that I didn’t make it in.

Maybe the sun will come up tomorrow and I’ll be brave again.

Maybe this is the last snowfall of the season.

Right.

December 9, 2014
by dawnkinster 10 Comments

We are here, we are here, we are HERE!

Revision note 12/10, 5:30 a.m.: Sadly Congress passed the Appropriations Bill last night while I slept. Complete with Senator Collins’ language to roll back truck safety. Read below and you’ll understand some of what the American people lost. It’s devastating.

How many of you remember the story by Dr. Seuss titled Horton Hears a Who? It’s the story of a whole world of people living on a spec of dust who must make a glorious and loud noise to prove their existence. That’s how I feel right now as those of us associated by tragedy to the Truck Safety Coalition fight to remove an amendment to the Appropriations Bill that will increase the allowable hours a professional driver can drive each week from 70 to 82 hours. The Appropriations Bill has to come up for a vote in the next couple of days and if the language is still included when that happens much of the work we’ve done over the past several years to require professional drivers to get adequate rest will be lost.

We are desperately trying to make enough noise to be heard.

I’ll try to keep this brief as I know during the holidays no one wants to spend a lot of time reading and thinking about things as serious as death and injury. As wrenching as grief. And most of your know my family’s story; dad was killed by a tired trucker on December 23, 2004. In two weeks it will be ten years. For nine of those years we’ve been fighting the battle, trying to get a safer Hours of Service Rule issued by the Department of Transportation. Finally, last year the new rule was mandated. It wasn’t everything we wanted. We wanted the maximum daily number of hours that a driver could drive to be reduced from 11 back to 10, and we lost that fight. But at least the new rule required drivers who had maxed out their weekly allowable hours of work to rest for two consecutive nights. The two nights of rest piece wasn’t just pulled out of a hat. There’s all sorts of scientific evidence that the human body needs certain kinds of rest in order to be fully functional, and two nights in a row helps to maintain the body’s rhythm.

As soon as the rule came out the American Trucking Associations attacked. And they helped Senator Collins from Maine to write the Collins amendment which would repeal this mandated two nights of rest. It’s basically the only step forward we’ve made in years of fighting, and this amendment would put us back to square one. It allows shippers and supervisors to once again push a driver to work up to 82 hours every week. That’s twice as many hours as you and I, or most Americans, work. And truck drivers don’t get paid overtime.

A recent poll showed that the majority of the American public is opposed to increasing truck driver hours. They know about the dangers of fatigued driving. The opposition to the legislative efforts to increase the allowable hours is across all demographic and political groups. If the majority of people oppose increased driving hours, then why is Congress so set on letting the two nights of rest be repealed?

Because the ATA financially supports their political campaigns.

And that’s why we absolutely need to make a louder noise. Right now. We need every Senator contacted tomorrow and again the next day if the vote on the Appropriations Bill hasn’t occurred. We need every Senator to know that we oppose the Collins Amendment being included in the bill. The Collins Amendment has nothing to do with appropriations and it has never been debated on the Senate floor. It was worked out in a closed door committee meeting and slipped into the bill as if it was a done deal.

Well it’s not done. Not yet anyway.

Please call your two Senators. Tell them you are against the Collins Amendment being in the bill. Tell them you want our roads to be safer and you expect them to stand up for safety rather than cave to expensive truck lobbyists who’s agenda is profit over safety. You can find your Senator’s phone #’s here. And if you’d like to read more, go to the Truck Safety Coalition website, or directly to a letter from two Senators who oppose the amendment. If you’d like to know more about Senator Collin’s motivation, read Joan Claybrook’s statement.

Please help.

This didn’t turn out to be the short, poetic heart-tugging blog I intended. But it’s so important and there’s no short way to explain what’s happening in Washington DC right this very moment. I can’t explain the politics of it any more than I can fully explain the grief of losing a family member suddenly, tragically, needlessly.

Please don’t think of this as my issue, my problem. The safety of our roads is everyone’s issue, everyone’s problem. It’s only by all of us banding together and making that glorious, loud noise that we will be noticed. Please help me make that noise. Make that noise as early as you can tomorrow. The Senate offices open at 9 a.m. Let’s make those phone lines sing. You can call later in the day too. Just please call.

The roads don’t belong to the ATA. They belong to all of us. And we deserve to garner as much attention as a paid lobbyist. We deserve to get more attention. We’re the ones that voted these Senators into their offices and they should be paying attention to us. We are here. We are here. We are HERE! Say it with me now. WE ARE HERE! And Senator Collins – we are not going away.

Thank you for your support. I miss you Dad.

October 29, 2014
by dawnkinster 7 Comments

How music heals

I heard a piece on news radio during my commute to work Tuesday morning about how upbeat music helps sad people feel better and calm music helps settle people who are stressed; how music can be used in any number of problem situations to make things better. True I thought.

True.

And I hoped at that evening’s concert we would be able to deliver a bit of fun, maybe even a bit of relaxation to our audience. We’d be playing Halloween music, things like March of the Trolls by Grieg, Shadow Rituals by Markowski, and The Fortune Tellers Daughter by Gorham. Mostly fun stuff, mostly things we could play if we paid attention, though Shadow Rituals was a toss up. We’d made it through that piece, from start to finish, for the first time at last week’s rehearsal. There were no guarantees we could do it again. On the other hand, as people who listened to it played by professionals have said, “Who would really know if you made a mistake?”

Good point.

We were all dressed in costumes for the concert, a bit of freedom from the normal black concert attire. Lots of people went all out and were unrecognizable; a purple telatubby, a vampire, the tallest leprechaun trombone player I’ve ever seen. (The photos here are from last year, I forgot to take a camera this year!) I just added a big tie and a clown hat to my normal workaday outfit. I figured some of my customers take us for underwriting clowns anyway so it was fitting.

I’d started the morning with a headache, a bit of a sore throat, and a sense of being light headed. By afternoon my eyes were itching and I couldn’t stop sneezing. “Great,” I thought. Just what I need. All I wanted to do after work was drive home and climb into bed. Then I got to the concert venue. Sniffles disappeared, eyes cleared up. Headache? Gone.

And that was even before we began to play.

I think the audience had fun. We got a standing ovation from most of the audience when we finished. Maybe they were just glad we were done. Or maybe they’re our relatives. Or both. But I think they had fun. But not as much fun as we had playing. I’ve always said, and I’ll say it again, it’s much more fun to be the one playing then the one listening. Even when listening is pretty darn good.

Our sound engineer forgot to turn on the recording equipment until after the third piece, so we played the first three over again at the end of the concert. Most people stayed to hear them again, and turns out we played them better the second time. We had a blast doing it. Tuesday night the news piece on the radio proved to be true. Music is what’s good for you.

And for me.

August 10, 2014
by dawnkinster 11 Comments

Loostrife

I enjoy reading Judy’s blog – she’s a full time RVer and a volunteer this summer at Tamarac Wildlife Refuge in Minnesota. This week she and another volunteer are assigned driving the back roads of the refuge looking for purple loosestrife. It’s an invasive plant that spreads quickly and chokes out the native plants in low lying, swampy areas.

If you live around here you’ve seen a lot of it. Judy says she and her volunteer partner didn’t see any this time, and I told her we had it everywhere over here in Michigan. So when Katie and I went for a walk yesterday afternoon and we saw all the loosestrife we thought of Judy. We decided you need to see this too.

Wetlands being taken over.

The first glimpse we had was from the overlook. Down near the water you can see the purple sheen in the late afternoon sun. Looks pretty doesn’t it. And it is pretty, that’s probably part of the problem. When I drive home from work and the sun hits that purple I can’t help but smile.

Closer view.

Then I remember that what is beautiful is also deadly to everything native that used to live there.

Katie and I found more of it, up close this time near the pond where people fish.

Spreading.

Spreading across the hillside above the water.

Pretty, isn’t it?

The park people have planted other wildflowers there that are just as pretty and not invasive.

Also pretty.

Katie and I spent a long time in the lingering sun photographing the beauty.

Makes you smile, doesn’t it!

In hindsight I should have pulled up that loosestrife along the pond after I was finished photographing it.

Dangerous

July 29, 2014
by dawnkinster 26 Comments

What to think, whose side to support.

I can’t watch TV anymore.

Round the clock news is filled with plane crashes and carjackings and runaways and murder trials and even worse, war. Up close and personal reports of war and the ordinary people that seem to be paying the price for leadership failure. Nonstop footage of dead and dying children. Interviews with mothers and fathers – you don’t have to speak their language to know what they are saying. To feel their grief.

Last night Anderson Cooper asked an onsite reporter the question I wanted to ask; where do regular people go to get away from the falling bombs? Nowhere is safe was the response from the corespondent wearing his helmet and bullet proof vest, instinctively flinching as incoming missiles shake the earth and light up the sky behind him.

Nowhere is safe.

I know I am not educated enough in the history behind the Palestine/Israeli conflict. It is generations deep and I don’t understand where it all comes from. But I listen to the leaders on each side being interviewed and I don’t see how it can be resolved. Everyone is so entrenched in their opinion of who is right and who is wrong. No one seems to be willing to listen to the other side. The cease fires expire or are broken, more warning sirens scream, more illumination missiles are shot into the air above Gaza, more people flee. Some don’t get away in time.

And I post pictures of baby deer and Katie and walks in the park and flowers in the garden and try not to think about the reality of life 7 or 8 hours ahead of my own time zone. Because I don’t know what to think about all of it; I can’t even talk about it intelligently. But I can say that it feels wrong – wrong on both sides. And that innocent people are dying and maybe it’s not our problem but then again I think maybe it is.

Not watching TV feels wrong too.

I am conflicted myself, not sure if I want to understand more of something that seems so unresolvable, but thinking I should learn about something so important. And then feeling overwhelmed by all the important things in the world that I don’t understand.

Which brings me full circle. I don’t know what to think.

June 16, 2014
by dawnkinster 12 Comments

Safety update. And turtles

Who you lookin at?

Today was a busy day as volunteers, including some of you, made phone calls to Senators in Washington, asking them to consider safety before profits — to strike down the Collins Amendment that would gut the Hours of Service Rule just instituted last summer, and to watch out for amendments that would prohibit any attempt at raising trucking company’s minimum liability insurance requirements. And as the day went on some Senators stood up and voiced concern over trucking regulations. In particular there is now another amendment, the Booker-Menendez Amendment (both are Democratic Senators out of New Jersey) that would strike down the dangerous part of the Collins amendment; the part that would cause the hours truckers are allowed to work to increase back to 82 a week. The Booker-Menedez Amendment would allow a study of the ‘unintended effects of two consecutive nights off’ for drivers who work 70 hours or more a week but would not make changes in the rule until after that study was complete. Seems like a good compromise to me. I called my Senators again late this afternoon and asked them to cosponsor that amendment. We’ll see.

I’ll keep you posted. I truly appreciate all your support, in all its different manifestations, from calls to writing, to hugs, to concern. It’s all important. And the more you talk about it with friends the better chance we have of making our politicians understand the importance of not letting profits compromise safety.

Scoping the lay of the land.

Meanwhile. I came home to find a Blanding Turtle (no I didn’t know the name, but a friend on Facebook did!) in my driveway. You know those things can move pretty fast when they want to. By the time I got inside and hooked the dog up for a walk to the mailbox it was nowhere to be seen. But I knew where it was, under some shrubs along the edge of the driveway. Because Katie wanted to go over there really bad. But I wouldn’t let her and we high tailed it back inside. Almost instantly I noticed it had moved up to the garage and was looking around. I think she’s trying to decide where to lay eggs. I watched and took pictures through a tiny bit of beveled glass in the front door.

She walked all the way up the driveway, along the garage door, then back past the front porch and under the car. Who knows where she went after that, but there’s a lot of garden for her to choose from. Katie and I went out on the deck to watch and listen to the birds. I fell asleep until the frogs began to sing. It would be a good night to camp out but sheer exhaustion precludes me from lugging the tent out and setting it up. Plus tomorrow is another day.

I hope Capital Hill sees fit to make the right decisions tomorrow. I hope they aren’t like my wandering turtle, just exploring and looking and ending up headed right back where they came from. Or hiding under a metaphoric car.

Wandering off to look for better places.

I’ll let you know. For tonight I’m pulling my head into my shell and getting some shuteye.

Katie says night too.

But Mama, I don’t want to go to bed yet!

Change Is Hard

…but change is certain.

Tag Archives: scary things