Date:         Thu, 13 May 2010 15:21:05 -0700
Reply-To:     Robert Fisher <garciasghostvw@GMAIL.COM>
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From:         Robert Fisher <garciasghostvw@GMAIL.COM>
Subject:      Re: vanagon camper seating capacity
In-Reply-To:  <64238F51-3F80-4B29-B7B9-B8D6613C5AF2@gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

--snip--
Is life only about money these day??
--snip--

If you were put in the position of having to decide between your kid, your
money and your smug feelings of rebelliousness/contrariness, which would you
choose?

It has nothing to do with courage, it has to do with common sense. It's
relatively cheap to make sure your passengers are properly secured; and as
to kids being strapped in for 8 hours: it beats the hell out of them flying
free inside the car at 60 mph for a quarter-second. Besides, DVD players and
DSis and such make it bearable (this from a guy that regularly travels
through completely unremarkable desert with three kids, and who once rode
most of the way from NYC to Knoxville on the rear-window deck of a Ford... I
had a hell of sunburn.)
Sure, more lived than died back in the day, but you could say the same thing
about the plague and WWII- it doesn't mean we should embrace those things.
It was precisely because so many died unnecessarily that these laws were
enacted, particularly in the cases of people that would've lived but didn't
because somebody else became a missile in the vehicle, or because somebody
lost control of their vehicle and killed somebody outside of it.

I have to wonder if the people that come up with this crap have ever
actually been in a car wreck. They happen so fast, and with so much force,
that it's really impossible to comprehend unless one has been through that
or something similar.

I was in two crashes when I was around 18, both of them quite similar in
terms of what happened to me in the car. In the first one I wasn't wearing a
seat belt, and I nearly killed my passenger from flying around loose in the
car (at 240 pounds); I spent a week in the hospital with a concussion/brain
injury that nearly killed me and I had the ...interesting... experience of
being blind for about 15 hours with no idea of whether or not I would regain
my vision. In the second, I had on my seat belt, and I got a bump on the
forehead.

I've worn my seat belt ever since, and so has everyone who has ridden with
me. My step-dad (who is an engineer) always felt like my attitude and the
laws were a personal imposition on him until I pointed out to him that it
didn't do anybody else any good to be strapped in if he was flying loose
about the cabin at road speeds and of course losing what little control over
the vehicle he might have had (as the driver) if he had been belted in- and
this was even after he'd sat with my mom by my hospital bed wondering if I
was going to make it that first time.

In that first crash, the guy that hit me bounced across the road and t-boned
an old couple waiting to turn at a stop sign, injuring them both, and the
woman severely (she had just removed her seat belt, since they were about to
pull into a UPS place). Several people (including myself) independently
described to the police that the guy had let go of his wheel and was
bouncing around the cab of his truck with his hands up. He was cited for
abandoning control of his vehicle, as well as everything that happened after
the initial impact with me.

People seem to think their decisions with their vehicle are all about
_them_, and completely ignore the fact that they're also making that
decision for everyone that comes with their sphere of operation/influence.
You're not driving in your own little world. Think about those massacres in
the south-east involving dozens of vehicles that start with one bonehead
that's driving too fast for the pea-soup fog he's in.

It often only takes one bad decision for everything to go wrong, but many
good decisions to make everything go right- tires, seat belts, whatever.

Cya,
Robert