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To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (6832)	4/14/2003 6:29:08 AM
From: Oral Roberts	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7689

A week or so ago I witnessed several high speed and violent roll overs due to an ice storm. Every vehicle was totaled. Every person was wearing seat belts and every one of them walked away un-injured. Seeing these vehicles being destroyed I can promise you that I doubt any of these people would have walked away without seat belts.

To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (6832)	4/14/2003 7:50:11 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7689

Do you disapprove of that too? Good grief, Laz. Did I say I disapproved of seatbelts or was disappointed that smallpox had been eradicated? I was merely musing about the pros and cons of then vs. the pros and cons of now. Not sure that, on balance, and when all things are considered, we're better off. Not sure we're not, either. Just musing. If you compare the risk from smallpox vaccinations when I was a kid with the risk of childhood obesity now, for example, I'm not at all sure that growing up now is better.

To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (6832)	4/14/2003 9:36:17 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 7689

More then-and-now: Niceness ineffective against bullying By Dale McFeatters Apparently just now catching up with two centuries' worth of memoirs, coming-of-age novels and childhood reminiscences, the guiding lights of education have decided that schoolyard bullying and teasing is a serious problem. In 1857, Thomas Hughes wrote a novel called "Tom Brown's Schooldays," about a shy, homesick kid who is unmercifully bullied at England's famed Rugby school. Brown and his picked-on chums turn the tables on the bullies in satisfying fashion. Brown went on to Oxford, and the worst of the bullies, Harry Flashman, went on to be the thoroughly reprehensible hero of a dozen delightful novels by George McDonald Fraser. Now Brown and Flashman would be taken aside to a "peace corner," where a trained interventionist would gently lead them to recognize the error of their ways and set them on the path to niceness, perhaps by sitting next to each other at lunch for a week. And the British Empire would have collapsed a hundred years earlier than it did. Modern-day American schools are styling themselves "Ridicule-free Zones," where gossiping, name-calling, dirty looks and forming cliques is forbidden conduct. Nobody ever said childhood was pain-free, and grade schools have their own social Darwinism that favors the strong, the good-looking and the popular. You can't choose up sides without someone being chosen last. Anything that can take unnecessary nastiness out of growing up and, although it's unfashionable to say so, teach good manners is all to the good. But one wonders what an anti-bullying campaign will be like once the education establishment fully embraces it. Sniper-eyed Wall Street Journal trend-watcher Andrea Petersen has taken a look at this trend in "The 'Re-Engineered' Child," and it looks as if the establishment will go overboard as usual. She said some schools have "You Can't Say You Can't Play" policies, meaning the kids have to play with anyone who asks them, including kids they don't get along with. At one time, before the era of "feelings," this was known as "gym": "Line up in alphabetical order and count off by threes!" It wasn't fair, but no one tried to con us into thinking it was a desirable form of human conduct. In other schools, "dirty looks"- and kids make weird faces all the time - are interpreted as bullying and subject to punishment. In a school described by Petersen, the enforcement is left in the hands of peer groups that sound a lot like a fourth-grade version of Cuba's Committees for the Defense of the Revolution. They mete out punishment that "can include Saturday detention or eating lunch alone for a week." (This seems counterproductive because one of the goals of the movement is to stop children from being alone.) In a certain middle school, she said, perpetrators of teasing are forced to write "reflection" papers and have their parents sign them. This smacks faintly of the old communist re-education camps, where those thought to be ideologically suspect were made to write papers of self-criticism and read them aloud to their peers. One wing of the niceness movement is "Don't Laugh At Me," founded by folk singer Peter Yarrow, who wrote a song of the same name to inspire kids: I'm a little boy with glasses, the one they call a geek A little girl who never smiles 'cause I've got braces on my teeth And I know how it feels to cry myself to sleep Don't laugh at me . . . It's moving, and we hope it works, but in the spirit of Thomas Hughes and Rugby, Yarrow should have written some additional verses, in which the little boy grows up to be an all-pro linebacker and software magnate and the little girl grows up to be a famed cover girl and heart surgeon. They return to school and rain torment on their tormenters. Today's kids need to dream, too. Today's picked-on child, tomorrow's Tom Brown. * Dale McFeatters is a columnist for Scripps Howard News Service, 1090 Vermont Ave. NW, Suite 1000, Washington, DC 20005; e-mail: mcfeattersd@shns.com.

To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (6832)	4/14/2003 1:18:07 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7689

Another "modern" thing is the drive against drunk driving. MADD. Do you disapprove of that too? I approve of laws against drunk driving but perhaps not all tactics against it. MADD sometimes pushes the envelope a bit, but I support their aims. Tim

To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (6832)	4/14/2003 1:26:07 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7689

Message 18837067

To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (6832)	4/15/2003 4:45:19 AM
From: Solon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7689

"Statistically, seatbelts do save lives. And common sense says they should." Common sense says they don't. And statistics say they don't. Most serious injuries (especially in city driving) occur from side collisions or from the sides of vehicles being spun into posts, lamp standards, etc. Good drivers have far better control over how fast they hit anything with the front of their vehicle than they have over avoiding direct side collisions. In all collisions one wishes to avoid contact with the outside force. Front collisons create a risk for body momentum striking forward in your vehicle with your weight and your speed of forward momentum. The weight is likely between 100 and 200 pounds. Side collisions create the same risk for body momentum...but far more often. They also have the risk of DIRECTLY contacting a mass of several TONS of DIRECT force at anywhere from 5 to 50 miles per hour. Being strapped against your door will kill you. Being able to avoid the door (even if you subsequently hit it with simple body weight) will simply leave you a wiser person. The seat belt scam is one of the most ignorant in human history. I remember when the Canadian Government was endorsing urea formaldehyde foam as the wonder insulation. I also remember them paying everybody to have it removed a few years later. For those who have no intention of taking responsibility for their survival, by all means wear a seat belt. Selt belts will prevent you from hitting your windshield when you drive into a building or something. Keep in mind though that your risk of spinal injuries will be increased. For those who understand that you can be hit at 30 miles an hour and receive nothing but shock if you can keep away from contact with the car sides--while any contact with the car side means instant death...this is your life. There is only one place where a seat belt is safer. That is in the MIDDLE of the back seat. If you have a child, he/she should be strapped in there. YOU should be against the door and NOT strapped in. All people unable to respond to an accident about to happen SHOULD be strapped in. But even if they have the ability to fall toward the middle of the seat, I would leave them unstrapped. They can always survive their own weight going into the opposite door. BUT they CANNOT survive a direct hit from another vehicle. The best thing when facing an inevitable collision which cannot be steered out of is to let go of the wheel and to wedge yourself between the backs of the bucket seats. The car can take tons and tons of forces. It won't feel any pain. Let the car take the force.