It’s Thursday, February 25, 2010 it remains to be seen if that’s good or bad.
Death to not having a primary seatbelt law.
On the surface, laws that require the wearing of seatbelts (helmets too) seem to be the kind of laws I despise: Laws that protect us from ourselves. I mean it’s your safety right? Who the hell is the government to tell you about your safety?
I’m glad you asked. I’m gonna share with you a hard memory.
My first duty assignment in the Air Force was to the 342nd Missile Security Squadron, at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Montana. It was probably my third or fourth tour in the missile field. I was working nights as the junior member of a two-man Alarm Response Team.
It was late summer, August if memory serves and we were on our way back from evicting a jackrabbit that had set off an alarm at one of our sites. It was a little past midnight and while it had rained a couple hours earlier, we were on a solid, well-maintained dirt road. While rounding a corner, our headlights swept over a pickup truck, lying on its side in a wheat field.
It wasn’t there when we went past this corner before, so the wreck had happened within the past hour. After calling it in, we investigated. I climbed up onto the driver’s side of the truck and shined my flashlight through the window. A five year old boy was huddled between the seat and the dashboard. His first words to me cut like a knife through my heart; “Where’s momma?”
We got the boy out, took him to our truck and wrapped him up in my field jacket. I stayed with the boy, while my partner went looking for the mom. He came back a few minutes later and with tears streaming down his face, shook his head.
Now, I don’t know if the mom would have survived the rollover had she been wearing a seatbelt. The deputy sheriff said that she probably would have and I have no reason to think otherwise. What I do know was that she was ejected from the vehicle and died from a broken neck. The kid had been wearing a seatbelt and aside from a bump on the head, didn’t have a scratch.
Where seatbelts are concerned, it’s not just about you.
If you’re not wearing your seatbelt and we’re in a wreck and you die as a result, you have now made me a participant in your death. I don’t think you have a right to do this. I don’t think you have the right to make me go the rest of my life with that memory. I don’t think you have the right to put friends, family and loved ones through the agony of losing you to a car wreck. Putting yourself at risk is one thing; putting someone else at risk is quite something else.
Seatbelt laws don’t protect us from ourselves; they protect us from each other. We need a primary seatbelt law. Right now, you can be pulled over for something else and fined if not wearing a seatbelt. We need a law that lets the cops pull people over and fine them for no reason other than not wearing a seatbelt.
In other news Tawny Summer Fisher-Jones was in court yesterday being charged with felony vehicular homicide. Ms Fisher-Jones is accused of driving drunk, running a red light and killing 59-year-old Merry Jane Trewhella. Ms Fisher-Jones was convicted of criminal endangerment in 2005 for driving drunk with her kids in the car. She received a deferred sentence for that.
In other news, the Obamacare summit kicked off this morning and is going pretty much as I expected it to. Obama kept trying to make the same point about insurance premiums going up, but strangely, no one took him to task over being the cause of this.
Just as I predicted, the increased taxes on health insurance companies were passed right on to the consumers. How come nobody (not even the Republicans) pointed this out?
Obama and his cast of characters also kept pointing out how they added a bunch of stuff the republicans wanted. Fine and good, but how’s about stripping out the crap we don’t want, like creating another huge, honking government bureaucracy? What about stripping that crap that requires everyone to buy insurance?
Even though I think Max Baucus is a class-A doofus, I did like his idea that medical providers be required to publicize their prices up front to allow for comparison (competition) shopping.
I like that some of the republicans keep circling back to the option of starting with a clean sheet of paper. Obama keeps wanting to tinker with the existing proposal. Lather, rinse and repeat. Hopefully, the message will be clear; the people hate this bill and want it done over. I pretty much expected this to be a bunch of blah-blah, blah-blah. I was not disappointed.
Lots of good opportunity for artwork though, but at the end of the day, Obama threatened to use the Budget Reconciliation tactic to push the existing piece of what Klingons call “petaQ” through. Ramming this through without any republican support will all but lock the congress to the Republican Party in November.
That’s assuming he can get 51 democrats who either aren’t running for reelection or don’t care about it in any way.
This was basically a very high level urinary Olympiad and while it was conducted with considerable decorum, I think it basically amounts to nothing when the dust all settles. I’m expecting huge disappointment and when it comes to the federal government, they never fail to fail.
