Cut the Cable

For those of you that do not watch the TV show "Lost" that's OK, just bear with me. On last weeks episode, they came up with a plan to contact the outside world and get rescued from the island. They had found a Satellite phone with the pilot of a crashed helicopter, but something was interfering with the signal. They were told that it was being jammed (I won't get into by whom, as that is a long story) from an underwater station. They knew where the station was because they had found a cable on the beach, and followed it to the station. So the plan they came up with was for someone to go to the underwater station, swim down, and risk their lives to turn off this signal. I'm sure it was supposed to be a very dramatic part of the show, but for my part, I looked at my wife and said, "Why don't they just cut the cable?" I mean a signal couldn't penetrate that much water with enough power to override a satellite phone across the entire island, so the controls must have been coming from the underwater station, along the cable to somewhere on the island. Instead of risking someones life, they could have just cut the cable from the relative safety of the beach. I couldn't help but think how often life is like this. Something happens, and we come up with complicated plans to try to make things right again. How often could we just take a step back and think about it for a minute, and maybe, instead of complicated plans, that so often go wrong, we could just cut the cable.