Smoking Kills: when did we lose the ability to communicate?

Communication between human beings has always been an interesting topic. I heard someone saying “the spoken word is not the received word” – basically meaning that what someone means to say isn’t necessarily what the other person hears.

That’s because of filters that people listen through. What I mean by that is that we all have experiences and preconceptions about situations or people which means we actually hear something different to what the person speaking think they’ve said.

However, that aside – recently there was an incident on a Megabus on the M6 Toll road in the UK Midlands which made me question whether we have lost the ability to communicate completely.

The incident in question was that “something” happened on the bus which caused a full scale terror alert. The bus was halted on the hard shoulder, armed police and ambulances galore turned up and everyone was escorted off the bus one by one by the armed police and made to sit in a cordoned off area of the now closed motorway. The motorway remained shut for 5 hours while “investigations” continued.

Obviously this was paraded endlessly on the parasitic rolling news channels with speculation about what might or might not have happened and what you could clearly see with your own eyes on the TV screen but presenters trying to “fill” have to keep stating the bloody obvious! Worse than that they also referred to the M6 Toll as “one of the busiest motorways in the country” – which means they’ve never actually been on it!

In the end it turns out that the “something” that happened on board this bus was an electronic cigarette that someone had which was creating artificial “smoke” (which I believe is just water vapour).

I have to ask why the hell didn’t someone on the bus just ask the person with the “smoking device” what it was? Surely this whole vastly expensive and time consuming operation could have been avoided with that simple question? Perhaps the Megabus and rural Staffordshire are known priority targets?

I would say you couldn’t make it up but someone already did. A few years ago the BBC had a fantastic comedy series called “Broken News” which was a complete lampooning of the rolling news channels and the pathetic coverage of anything and everything that they give.

That show had the story of “Union Air Flight 216 from Chicago to Amsterdam” which was the subject of intense media speculation about a possible hijack. When it landed in Amsterdam it emerged that the “situation” was that someone on board had a wooden spoon.

There are some ridiculous parallels here although the bus situation response was arguably much worse. If the authorities in the spoof comedy program had responded to the situation in the same way that the UK emergency services responded to the bus incident, the entire airport would have been closed for ½ a day while they examined the spoon. That wouldn’t have been believable – well, until now!

Unfortunately, too often people don’t communicate with each other openly and honestly. If they did then all sorts of things would be far easier but I think we’re too scared of what might happen if we tell people the truth. Sadly it seems to be getting worse!

The broken news BBC page for the hijack is here http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/brokennews/indepth/hijack.shtml