Posted on 05/23/2004 2:18:30 PM PDT by RWR8189
EVEN THOUGH ROUGH WINDS do shake the darling buds thereof, I think we can all agree that May is a fabulous month, flush and lusty as the poets say, a time to gather knots of flowers, and buds and garlands gay. It is the month above all of Mother's Day, made doubly so by the decision of the United States government to transform itself for a few weeks every May into a kind of Mom for everybody--your Mom, my Mom, even our Moms' Mom. And this national Mom has a few things she'd like to get settled right here and now, mister.
The government becomes Mom every May under the auspices of the Department of Transportation, specifically the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The NHTSA (pronounced nhtsa) has taken to devoting the latter half of the month to an annual "mobilization" program called "Click It or Ticket!" (This year it runs from May 24 to June 6.) It's an unusual name for a government program, isn't it? The exclamation point, of course, is part of the title, though the real problem with the name, in my opinion, is its lack of parallelism. The two halves of the phrase don't balance out, if you see what I mean. Click it is a statement in the imperative mode. Ticket is just a freestanding noun, or perhaps a verb--it's unclear in what sense the word is being used. Anyway, grammatically, the two halves aren't parallel. They just sound parallel. Click it or Tick it! would be parallel. Click it or Ticket it! would be parallel. But that's not what they mean. What they mean is, Click it, or Mom will give you a ticket. Mister.
Click It or Ticket! is a mass deployment of the country's law enforcement apparatus and a good deal of its transportation bureaucracy, intended to persuade you to wear a safety belt when you drive your car. More than $10 million in radio and TV advertising will be unleashed. Local police will implement "zero tolerance enforcement of safety-belt laws," blanketing the nation's highways and streets with "checkpoints and saturation patrols" to better monitor the citizenry and hand down citations for those motorists who have the nerve to think they can just drive around unbuckled. School teachers will festoon classrooms with admonitions about what happens to the unstrapped. Lobbyists plan to flood the halls of Congress and state capitols, demanding the enactment of "primary" seat-belt laws.
These primary laws are a recent innovation. They not only make seat-belt use mandatory, they let any fastidious policeman stop motorists on the suspicion that they aren't buckled up. For the most part the primary laws are replacing "secondary" seat-belt laws, which allow cops to ticket an unbuckled driver only when they've stopped him for other traffic violations. Secondary laws have been in place for a generation--a relic of that distant time when primary seat-belt laws would have been considered a frivolous, not to say ominous, expansion of the government's police powers. Now 18 states have marched boldly toward a future of perfect safety by enacting primary laws, and the mobilizers intend on enlisting the rest.
There are many techniques available to a government intent on saving its citizens from their own laziness or stupidity. The first is fear. Click It media campaigns favor dark, ill-focused ads with spooky voiceovers and a soundtrack fidgety with hip-hop. A recurring image in the Click It literature--Click Lit--is a close-up of a highway patrolman's unblinking face leaning through a driver's window. (Funny, you don't look like Mom.) Other images, mostly of unhappy traffic accidents, are even less appetizing. Local cops have been instructed to appear at neighborhood high schools and ask the students how many wear seat belts, and to hand out mock tickets to those who answer incorrectly, as a way of preparing them for the real thing. For the more literary-minded seat-belt enthusiasts, NHTSA has prepared a prewritten letter to the editor, which they can simply sign and mail in to the local newspaper, as though they had written a real letter all by themselves.
The letter to the editor is full of statistics. No government mobilization can proceed without statistics. Click Lit releases a blizzard of them, all rendered with mysterious precision and certitude. "Each percentage point increase in safety-belt use represents...approximately 270 more lives saved," the Click Lit states. That's what it says this year, anyway; in last year's Click Lit the figure was approximately 250 lives. But who's counting? All those traffic accidents with all those mangled bodies, those severed limbs and punctured craniums--they're a terrible human loss, of course, but what's even worse: They're expensive. "Highway crashes cost society $230.6 billion a year," the Click Lit says. Really? How so? Figures like this are never quite explained. Why $230.6 billion? Why not $233.2 billion, or $229.8 billion? I've tried several times over the last few years to track down the calculations behind such estimates, lobbing queries into the green-eyeshades at NHTSA and elsewhere, and have yet to receive an answer beyond, It's complicated. Trust us. (Because I'm your mother, that's why.)
The statistical blizzard obscures more than it illuminates, anyway. What it obscures most of all is the question-begging behind safety enthusiasms. The two-part question in regulatory schemes that are designed to make us safer is, How much safer, and at the sacrifice of what? Who doubts that we could save many more than 270 (or is it 250?) lives a year if we imposed a national speed limit of 35 mph and required everyone to wear a football helmet outdoors? We could probably do away with seat belts altogether and still come out ahead--not that I want to give Mom ideas.
In any case, the statistical projections look even iffier when compared with statistical facts. In the United States, traffic fatalities, per mile, are a fraction of what they were 50 years ago. There are many reasons why. We drive in safer cars on better roads, and encounter fewer drunk drivers when we get behind the wheel. And more of us use seat belts. Yet the relationship between any one of these causes and the effect of fewer fatalities is hard to untangle. For instance: Just as seat-belt use has risen--from 67 percent of automobile passengers in 1999 to 75 percent in 2002--traffic fatalities have risen, too: from 41,717 in 1999 to 42,815 in 2002, an increase not accounted for by the increase in miles driven.
No such complication will deter the mobilizers, of course. If fatalities had decreased while seat-belt use increased, they would have cited the fact as evidence that we need more primary seat-belt laws, more checkpoints, more saturation patrols. But because fatalities have increased even as seat-belt use has increased, the coincidence is used as evidence that--well, you know: We need more primary seat-belt laws, and more checkpoints, and more saturation patrols, and more ghost-written letters to the editor . . .
"Safety belt use has increased significantly in the past few years," we read in the Click Lit, "but more must be done."
More must always be done. We must always be made safer, if not freer, and the law of unintended consequences must always be blithely dismissed. The last great project of the safety mobilizers, you'll recall, was to make air bags mandatory in passenger cars. This was saluted as an epochal victory for safety until it was shown that an air bag could have an unexpected side effect on "America's children": It tended to decapitate the little guys.
As a result, needless to say, the federal government rescinded the air-bag mandate and...no, wait. That's not what happened. The federal government kept the air-bag mandate and added some new ones--elaborate rules about who can sit where in private cars. When the mobilizers start mobilizing, the effect is always the same: Government mandates spread, the sphere of private decision-making shrinks, and perfect safety remains mysteriously elusive. The upside, from the point of view of the mobilizers, is that they will never be out of work. When I first heard about Click it or Ticket!, I called Lon Anderson, a spokesman for the Mid-Atlantic AAA, who described his organization's energetic lobbying effort on behalf of primary seat-belt laws.
"But now that we've made air bags mandatory," I asked, "and we've made sure everybody is sitting where they're supposed to in the car, why do we need seat belts? Aren't they sort of redundant?"
Lon's voice rose an octave. "Are you serious?" he said. "Are you kidding me?"
I told him I was genuinely curious.
"Look," he said, "do you know what an air bag does? An air bag is an explosion in the closed passenger compartment of an automobile. That thing exerts nearly a ton of pressure as it inflates within that closed compartment. The force is simply incredible. And very dangerous."
"Jeez,'' I said. "So you mean . . ."
"Exactly,'' he said. "You need the seat belt to protect you from the air bag."
Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
Save me from myself, crap like this just drives me nuts.
Cheer up, it will get worse!
A better solution would be secondary air bag air bags to protect you from the primary air bags.
That way the air bag manufacturers could make twice as much money.
I have spent over a decade arguing with Seatbelt Nazis and others about the unintended consequences of one-size-fits-all- mechanical engineering frequently to no avail.
It is good to see this become a wider public debate.
Thanks for the post.
Best regards,
Self-governance is such a drag, man.
Let's see now, whose job was it to watch the watchman who watches the watchman who watches the watchman............ad infinitum.
If our founding fathers returned tomorrow they would throw up at the sight of what we have become.
One of the best inventions for automobile travel is the seat belt.
One has to be foolish NOT to use a seat belt. The nanny coming into your lives is most likely the insurance companies who don't want to pay for people's freedom to be injured in an automobile accident.
Yeah how did we survive. When we were kids my brothers and I wrestled in the back of the family car during long road trips. We hated wearing seatbelts because they were a pain to put on and off.
So you support my initiative to ban sports? Great, I will count on you and like minded safety advocates to help win the fight. It's the right thing to do.
Amen. I'm heartily sick of being "protected". I was the passenger in a rollover accident last year involving a deer- my seatbelt and the rollbar we installed in our convertible saved my life-my broken ribs, torn muscles, facial cuts and burns, as well as my husband's similar injuries (not to mention having pieces of hot plastic from the air bag cover propelled at me so hard they became embedded in the flesh of my arm, neck and leg) were caused by the f'ing air bag. Since both of us are rather slim and small boned, the effect was not fun. Air bags are an invention of the devil, and they deploy at the slightest provocation-that accident didn't even involve the front end of the car. We bought switches to put on ours-we turn them on on the highway, off the rest of the time. I can't wait till someone files a class action suit against the airbag manufacturers-and I usually hate lawsuits...
Mostly due to reckless, inattentive, or inexperienced driving, or being under the influence of drugs and/or alcohol. Even most of the people who die in auto wrecks still wore seatbelts.
One of the best inventions for automobile travel is the seat belt.
Wrong. It's satellite radio.
One has to be foolish NOT to use a seat belt.
None of the government's business. It is my choice to wear a seat belt or not without bureaucrats and busy-bodies telling me so. And besides, seatbelts are so constricting. The shoulder harness rubs against my neck in an irritating, light stranglehold kind of way.
I didn't say the government has any right to restrict your right not to wear a seatbelt. Although I think it's quite a good idea to wear a seatbelt and shoulder harness.
If you re-read my post, you'll see I'm accusing the insurance companies of getting the government into our lives because of the cost of the liberty to drive without seatbelts.
I really don't care if you don't wear a belt and harness. Me, I'm in a Navigator with belt and harness. If we have the opportunity to run into each other, I'll be sure to visit you in the hospital ward.
Switch to decaf. You're babbling.
They don't pay anyway. At least not in my case when I was hit from behind and left with a lifelong debilitating injury because of a negligent driver. Some sleazebucket lawyer got them out of it. Anyway, insurance companies don't have to pay if it is determined that a seat belt was not worn at the time of the accident. So, that mangled body better find a way to strap itself in after the fact of a violent collision if no selt belt was worn.
LEOs will be so busy milking the CashCow looking for no-seatbelt criminals (the horror!) I wonder if they'd notice a truck full of illegals.
I've probably driven over 1 million miles in my lifetime, most of it without a seatbelt, and the only accident I was in I was spared because I didn't have one on!
The Nanny-State is in "it's for the children" full-swing lie again, they're just trying to pay for BIG gov't. spending.
Faggot (not you, RWR8189, the fruit-loop "Andrew" who wrote the article).
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