Looking forward or looking backward

Travel to any vacation destination is stimulating. New places, new people, new situations. The further afield you travel, the more stimulating.

When we spend time here in Florence, we see many things that make us stop and ponder. The food is so good and the people are so trim. How can that be? Of course, there is much more walking and biking here but the food is hard to ignore. And yet few Florentines carry excess weight. An overweight person in the center of the city is most likely a tourist, not a local.

A publicly accessible
cigarette machine

Some other things are bewildering. Italian homes are spotless. The saying that “You could eat off the floor” would be probably uncomfortable physically but correct in the hygienic sense in Italy. But public spaces are messy and litter is tossed about casually. The city makes heroic efforts to clean up each day but the one day of the week when they let up, Sunday, the mess multiplies until Monday morning when the cleanup begins anew.

The other day I passed a cigarette vending machine that was outside, on the face of a building, available to the public 24 hours a day. At first I though that it was incongruous; Italy has banned smoking indoors and the warnings on cigarette packs say “Fumare uccide” (roughly “Smoke and you will die”) in boldface type that takes up half the face of the pack. Odd, then, that a cigarette vending machine would be so open and so available.

With a closer look this is not the case. The machine has four places for the user the interact with the machine. First, you check the display to see what you have chosen and how much it costs. Second, you insert your diver’s license or some other official document that indicates your age. (Cigarette purchases are limited by age.) Third, you feed the machine a bill, a banknote, since cigarettes and about the some prices as the lowest denomination of paper money, five Euro. Fourth and finally, you get change.

That second step is interesting. We have nothing like that at home. And it’s so simple. Yes, a young person could use a parent’s driver’s license but that would be skating on pretty thin ice with your parents and a machine sophisticated enough to scan bar code could keep records of whose official document was used to purchase a pack a cigarettes. Imagine a cigarette machine emailing a parent to notify them that their driver’s license had been used to buy a pack! Creepy but a parent might want to know something like that.

Detailed image

This is not to recommend cigarette smoking or cigarette machines; this is only to recommend fresh thinking.

At home the presidential race, particularly on one side, seems totally focused on old controversies. Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 should have made birth control uncontroversial but here we are discussing the issue as if it were current. 

By the way Italy has the lowest birth rate in Europe. Last I looked, Italy was a Catholic country. What could be causing that? Whatever the cause, there is no controversy here.

Roe v.Wade may still be controversial legally but it was decided in 1973. This is not new stuff except for rearward facing politicians.

It seems a shame that our public life at home includes so much discussion about issues that were settled in the past. This leaves less space for thought about how to fashion our future.

A note that is somewhat related

I’m reading a biography called Thomas Jefferson; American Sphinx by Joseph Ellis. He notes that Jefferson pressed for the decimalization of our currency. Of course, he was successful and instead of the mysterious pounds, shillings, pence, quids, and whatever else the English use, we have a much simpler system.

A smart vending machine that checks for proof of age is an interesting idea. It’s never occurred to me and you wonder what other applications there might be for such an idea. But it’s striking because it’s different.

Too bad that Jefferson didn’t press on into decimalizing measurement. If we had adopted the metric system, we might not have to teach fractions to kids in elementary and middle school. That fact that we don’t teach fractions to students in high school doesn’t necessarily mean that they know how to use fractions! And adults?

Can you imagine the Republicans with the issue of the United States adopting the metric system? Rush Limbaugh? The sky would definitely be falling.