The Guy Can’t Help It : We May Not Want Them, But Harry Has the Answers to All Our Problems

IT’S NOT EASY being a person who, judging by the scores on those old career-counseling tests in college, just likes to help people. I’m speaking, as it happens, of myself. Look at the flak that’s descended on me in the letters column simply because I tried to help fix the schools or help keep some restaurants from going under or help combine French and Spanish.

Nonetheless, the urge to be of assistance to mankind isn’t something a guy can just switch on or off like so much electrified anti-burglar fencing. It’s a habit of mind, like looking for stuff on sale.

When I talk about helping my fellow man, don’t get me wrong. You won’t find me down on Skid Row scooping out mashed potatoes for the homeless on Thanksgiving. Not that I think that’s a bad thing to do. It’s just that I can never figure out where to park down there.

My particular version of help takes a more cerebral form: I can’t avoid thinking of Bright Ideas that would make all of our lives easier, more pleasant, more healthful. Unlike those inventors who make a fortune in late-night TV commercials by marketing their ideas, I prefer to give mine away. It’s just neater and nicer and means I have to spend less time talking to lawyers.

Bright Ideas are common-sense notions that just seem to have eluded the notice of everyone else. For example, ozone.

Don’t worry. I’m not going to leave you there, with just the word ozone dangling over your breakfast like so much unshredded wheat. Ozone is believed to be hazardous to human health when present in large enough quantities at ground level, where humans tend to live. But there’s equal concern about the depletion of the ozone layer up in the stratosphere, or the ionosphere, or one of those spheres, where it protects us from cancer-causing solar rays.

You see what I’m getting at? Too much ozone down here because of cars and things. Too little ozone up there presumably also because of profligate use of our man-size chemistry sets. We could change our entire way of life, which even the most Calvinist of environmentalists may, in their more reflective moments, realize is a pathetic pipe dream. Or we can figure out a way to pump the excess ozone away from down here and pipe or spray or dump it up there. Turn the bad ozone into good ozone, beat our smog into plowshares, that sort of thing.

Don’t ask me about specifics. That’s for the drones to figure out. I just know that if there’s too much of it here and not enough of it there, that’s the kind of problem man can solve.

Same with water. Not only do we live in a desert, but our desert is also going through a drought--a pretty classic case of not enough water. Historically, our policy has been to con, buy or steal water from some part of Northern California that can’t afford good enough legal advice, but those folks are, sadly, getting wise to us.

On the other hand, there are parts of the country, like Louisiana, that are so waterlogged that they must constantly build and reinforce dikes and levees and other temporary defenses against the inexorable watery onslaught. As it happens, Louisiana is connected to our corner of the world by a pipeline, whose function is to transport natural gas to our ovens and water heaters. But it’s a pipeline, just the same. Therein, the Bright Idea. Flush out the pipeline periodically and use it to send Mississippi River water straight to our thirsty little settlement.

Using a gas pipeline to transport drinking water is no more disgusting than some of the things we do now, like using the same trucks to transport food in one direction and hazardous wastes in the other. Making the process even less disgusting is a job for the experts. The nub of the idea is simplicity itself: Louisiana is dirt-poor; we’re aerospace- and movie-rich. Let’s make a deal. Then we can tell the Northern Californians to take their water and stick it in their sulfite-loaded wines.

One more dose of help for a harried humanity. What slows down freeway traffic almost as much as accidents themselves are the remains of mishaps: cars crumpled into the median dividers, CHiPs setting out flares on the shoulder, firefighters hosing down flaming former Toyotas. Drivers slow down to check out the debris; other drivers plow into their taillights; the great chain of freeway disaster is renewed. Rubbernecking at fender-benders, as the traffic jocks put it, is an easily preventable hazard.

All we have to do, Bright Idea-wise, is equip all CHP cars with folding screens--the kind used to partition hospital rooms, for example. So the first thing the officers do at the scene of an accident is set up the screen, shielding the debris from view. Passing drivers no longer see broken glass, revolving red lights and mashed fenders; all they see is the screens, perhaps blank, perhaps emblazoned with helpful slogans like “Keep it moving; show’s over.” I don’t know. Again, I’m not a detail man. I’m doing big-picture work here.

There are, of course, plenty more Bright Ideas where these came from. But I’m running out of space. Besides, a guy gets tired trying to help all the time. Now I know how Mother Teresa feels.