Gone The Way Of The Dodo

It's become a very scarce commodity; common sense. As though people have become completely overwhelmed by the demands made upon their discriminating sense of identifying the urgent from the mundane. Happy to give their brains a rest and rely completely on mechanical devices rather than attempt to discern reality and appropriate responses to specific circumstances.

Computers have become the superior intelligence and mankind offers obeisance to the beast's commands. Succumbing to the safety of expediency in a society besieged by messages of impending terrorist strikes. Abandoning human skills of informed decision-making and empathetic humanitarian responses.

Here we are, friends and neighbours, and there's that old truism that neighbours should be friends. After all, we are reliant upon one another for so many reasons, sharing a geographic space on the planet. Our values, customs and traditions are similar, although to be sure our variant political climates shatter the illusion that we share everything in a commonweal separated only by an artificial border.

We both recognize the vital importance of first-responders to emergency situations, are each prepared to stand back and permit these professionals to do that which we cannot. Ready to stand forward to assist if the need for assistance is requested. As, for example, an urgent request put through to contiguous-border-located firefighters on the Canadian side by their upstate New York counterparts; a common enough occurrence.

What was different this time was that border security at U.S. Customs insisted on stopping a fire engine with flashing emergency lights and blaring sirens, to assess its business and legitimacy, while their presence was required immediately to help bring a fire under control. Mistakes do happen; errors in judgement occur, we are but human. But put the clues together and a reasonably intelligent interlocutor can reach a reasonable conclusion fairly speedily.

In a later occurrence shortly afterward, an ambulance out of Windsor ferrying an emergency patient to a hospital in Detroit - the vital equipment not available at the Canadian hospital - was halted at the border. The usual protocol had been observed; the U.S. hospital agreeing to see to the heart attack patient's urgent need for life-saving surgery. The ambulance had had the usual benefit of a police escort to the tunnel entrance.

Tunnel traffic had been shut down as a precautionary measure in the emergency situation. Once the ambulance had arrived at the border crossing, a pickup truck belonging to the tunnel company, complete with flashing lights led the ambulance to the designated U.S. Customs lane as has been performed on many other occasions. The expectation being that the ambulance would be waved through in recognition of its urgent mission.

Instead, a U.S. border guard forced the ambulance, sirens blaring, flashing lights notwithstanding, to pull over. The U.S. Customs officers informed the ambulance driver he would have to enter the Customs office at the secondary inspection area and provide identification and allied documentation. While other guards insisted the paramedic crew open the ambulance back doors so they could request that the victim being conveyed personally confirm his identity.

Luck was with the 49-year-old heart-attack patient who had twice been brought back to life with defibrillators. He survived his emergency angioplasty surgery at Detroit's Henry Ford Hospital. In whose care he remained in the cardiac care unit still in serious, but recovering condition, when the story of the border guards whose intense scrutiny of even obvious first-responder emergency crews trumped common sense.

Turns out a U.S. Customs-deployed computer had randomly selected the ambulance vehicle for intense scrutiny. The computer's demands are not to be denied. To take the measure of the situation and duly inform oneself that an emergency overrides routine inspection needs is evidently far too much to ask of intelligence-hampered uniforms. More's the pity.