I Didn't Choose This

There has been quite a lot of news about the recall of Takata airbags--which have a nasty tendency of exploding. My airbag had been replaced, so I couldn't understand why I was still getting dire notices in the mail. The picture at left is the latest. It turns out that they had only replaced my driver-side airbag (the initial recall). This explains why Friday evening, when I went to Hall Honda to make the annoying orange light on my dashboard turn off--a process that requires me to have my oil changed--I wound up spending three hours in the waiting room while they replaced the passenger-side airbag.
I had brought a book which I needed to read, on the statistical analysis of ordinal categorical data. I haven't bothered providing you, gentle reader, a link to this book on Amazon because it is entirely as boring as it sounds. I found myself alternately falling asleep and being distracted by the blaring television. I listened intermittently to the Steve Harvey Show and to Dr. Phil. These are both shows that I generally try scrupulously to avoid. Much of the Steve Harvey show was about a case of spousal abuse. The episode of Dr. Phil concerned a mother who made the difficult choice to relinquish her teenage son into foster care because she was being repeatedly battered by him. At one point the son, who was also on the show, said with tears in his eyes: "I didn't ask to be born your son."
I am writing this week about choice; in particular, about instances where we assume people have a choice when they really don't--or sometimes, they don't yet--and instances where we don't want to let people choose. In the Dr. Phil episode, we saw two instances of choice: the mother chose to turn her son over to foster care, and the son had no choice in his birth.