Most people with something besides air between their ears surely know that the European Union is, in many respects, out to lunch on things of importance and lacking in common sense on things that are not. Add to that, a bureaucracy that has raised itself to the status of a deity that looks for any minuscule reason to mount the rooftops and shout 'Ah ha, caught you!" and we have some idea of stupidity running amuck. A case in point.
A story out of London, England informs us that the EU has decreed that trapeze artists with "one of the world's most famous circuses have been told to start wearing hard hats to comply with new European Union safety rules."
The Moscow State Circus is currently touring England and jugglers, tightrope walkers and other acrobats have been "instructed to don safety headwear because of European regulations covering workers employed at heights greater than the average stepladder."
"It is bureaucracy gone made, with a lot of help from current compensation culture," the general manger of the circus told reporters. It seems that the circus' insurers have warned the acrobats, etc., that they risk losing their coverage if they are injured in the course of their work without the protection of hard hats.
One performer who fell about 30 feet and was injured - both arms and three ribs broken - during a performance in Rio de Janeiro said, "A hard hat wouldn't have helped me then, and it won't help me now. Working in the circus, you get injured all the time; but you just have to get over it." He added that hard hats would be more of a liability than anything else would. "They could slip over the artists' eyes or throw the performers off balance."
Imagine this: a highwire walker 50 feet above the ring below steps out onto the wire and begins the dangerous walk across a 100-foot void. Suddenly, the damn hardhat slips slightly then falls off the artist's head; this throws the artist off balance. The artist scrambles to stay aloft but loses the battle. As the audience holds its collective breath waiting for the inevitable dull thud, the artist's body tumbles and twists in its headlong plunge to the ground below. When it strikes the ground, it is broken beyond recognition. The body lands hard on the Brussels' bureaucrats' fiat; the walker's pelvis is broken when it hits the tin hat.
A serious injury might have been prevented had the tightrope walker not been forced to wear a tin hat.
The bureaucrats in Brussels congratulate themselves on having won yet another point in their mad race to eliminate common sense from European life. Later that night, they go out for a drink and dream up more ways to interfere in European lives. For the bureaucrats, it will be victory at all cost.
In the meantime, the circus folk look at their wheelchair bound friend and curse the idiocy of bureaucrats worldwide but particularly those in the EU.
Of course this is conjecture but so was the thought of a man landing on the moon conjecture years ago. All but the simplest minded among us know that the USA did put a man on the moon and return him successfully to Earth decades ago. Perhaps the bureaucrats in Brussels missed that newscast.
Bob Orrick is a private tutor of English grammar, literature, poetry and Canadian history to off-shore youngsters. His pupils hail from such places as Taiwan, China, Japan, Hong Kong, Korea and Venezuela. He was previously in international marketing, was a ministerial assistant to a provincial cabinet minister, spent a few years as a reporter then editor of a community newspaper and enjoyed a career in the Royal Canadian Navy.
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