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Beware the Frisbees...they bite

Posted by Wayne (Melbourne, Australia) on 27 January 2007 in Sport & Recreation.

This was a sign taken on one of my travels.

Its funny how a bureaucracies work. They start out with good intentions. They balance the need for frisbees (Sports is healthy is good) with the need for unsuspecting people not to get hit by them (Public Safety for potential voters). Then through the mysterious and mystical process of Committees and Reviews and Action Plans (Complete with vision/mission statements and workflow charts) they come up with signs that seem so utterly bizarre and out of place. Its like having an annual convention to discuss the growing problem of paper cuts and to form an action plan against its debilitating effects on workplace safety levels.

Life's a bit like a bureaucracy I find. The world, with good intentions, tries to classify everybody for the needs of efficiency and effectiveness; be you tall, short, intelligent, academically gifted, etc. But the problem is sometimes the world forgets that a life is more than just the sum of its parts. Every life is imbued with greatness. What's even sadder is that some people forget that they're champions in their own right and start believing in the party line of the world - limiting their own infinite capacity.

In my own life as a university student, I come across many people who in their lives have been hurt by the negative things people say in order to urge their children to do better. Better in this case being highly subjective. I, myself, am a product of a hypercompetitive environment that places extraordinary emphasis on academic performance and while I'm thankful for it and for the fact that I've benefited from it...I know heaps of others that the system has chewed up, left out and shrunk.

It's a system that was created for good intentions...after all my home country is but a small red dot on a map and we don't have the luxury of not developing our human resource to its breaking point. But in the end, we as a collective forget that everyone is special and valuable in their own. Everyone has something to contribute outside the set rules of an arbitrary system of what is and is not valuable - not whether or not they scored this many As or not.

So when I see this photo...it reminds me that even when people've label things on me...I can walk away knowing that those comments were a product of the same system that cautions me to be vigilant against frisbees. I mean, after all, how seriously can one take the comments of a system that fears frisbees eh? =D

Have a good weekend guys =D
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Panasonic DMC-FX8
1/50 second
F/4.9
ISO 80
103 mm

humor
sign
caution
public
humour
frisbee
comedy