Cowboy Safety, Wyoming, and Etch a Sketch

Today on CNN, Eric Fehrnstrom, an adviser to Mitt Romney, spoke of a new start for Romney's campaign after winning the Illinois primary. “Everything changes,” Mr. Fehrnstrom said. “It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again.”


Interesting thought with some history behind it. 


The Virginian, by Owen Wister, is the quintessential Wyoming story of Equality. At the Swinton barbecue, speaking of the unnamed cowboy for whom the book was named, school teacher Molly Wood said "There's a stranger now. Who is that black man?" "Well - he's from Virginia. and he ain't allowing he's black." 


In Wyoming race and color did not matter. Perhaps the Virginian was a freed slave. Where you came from and what you did before coming to Wyoming did not matter. All that mattered was what you were in Wyoming. To paraphrase Fehrnstrom, Wyoming was like an Etch A Sketch. 


Cowboy Safety works the same way. In the industrial age safety was done in a certain way. Legal compliance became more important than incident prevention. People were treated as machines that had to be protected more from themselves than anything else. 


Then safety was all shaken up.  


Safety became a part of the design process. Instead of binders full of engineering legalese, safety became a part of one's life. Automation took over the nitty gritty. Much of safety became invisible. Hazards became those of situational stress. We began to realize that safety is not the same everywhere. And after 9/11 we began to do safety differently. 


In the same way that Wyoming was a geographic place of a new start, safety is a continuing new start not just in our physical location but in our minds and in our actions. Each day is different. Each situation is different. Being safe from random events and secure from planned events means to constantly shake that Etch A Sketch. 


David Sneed