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And because this driver was working on behalf of the school, the school is surely drawn into the whole thing. The "deep pockets" principle will take over. The accident is surely a reminder of the frailty of our mortal existence. It is a reminder that at any moment, disaster can befall us. It is a reminder of the inherent extreme danger of our motorized transportation. The young generation even has some reservations about adopting the habit of driving a vehicle.
There was a time when transportation and its unbounded nature, lifted by Eisenhower's Interstate Highway project, was as American as apple pie. It seemed synonymous with the very freedom that defines us.
The driver of the van in the accident is 68 years old. I'm 63. A problem with us people is that for most of our lives, seat belt use was not mandatory. Today the police watch us very carefully to make sure belts are on. I'm not sure why this kind of monitoring wasn't done in past times. Did we just accept the risk? You know who feels uncomfortable with that risk? Insurance companies. Pressure from the insurance industry can explain many shifts in public policy and the law.
I'm not Mr. Insurance but let me speculate a little: there is no doubt there was negligence in the case of the horrific accident. The kids needed to be belted in and they weren't. The driver was of my generation which has needed prodding to realize the essential nature of seat belt use. I don't think I ever once used seat belts in my glorious 1967 Oldsmobile Toronado. Today the cops will descend on you unhesitatingly.
Have you wondered that it must be difficult to even determine whether a motorist is belted? Some vehicles have tinted windows, presumably within the law, that appear to make it impossible to see if people are belted. Why should such motorists be insulated from the law better than other people? Driving after dusk is an issue unto itself. The Swift County sheriff was initially unsure whether the kids in that van were legally required to be belted in. I chided him for that in my previous post on the subject. I suggested that he just "pick up the phone" to find out.
Furthermore, does his uncertainty mean that if he were patrolling himself, and observed a school van with kids not belted in, he would refrain from pulling that van over because of his clouded judgment? Look at the consequences of those kids not being belted in. Because of the negligence, I wonder how the insurance issues will be affected. It was a Hancock school van. I imagine Supt. Loren Hacker experienced tremendous stress both because of those poor kids being hurt so badly, and the possible monetary ramifications for the school.
Would a school's liability policy be activated? I imagine the cost of treatment for those kids will be substantial. Even if the school's insurance comes into play, which surely it must, the school would probably be looking at higher premiums in the future, n'est-ce pas? I have heard someone say the accident and its consequences could endanger the school's ambitious upgrade plans. I just have to ask: could the accident force the school into bankruptcy? If the answer is an incredulous "no," then I'd have to compliment the U.S. insurance industry for being so accommodating. I guess it would be proof that insurance surely works.
We must ask if Hancock administrators had knowledge of whether or not it was the practice of van drivers not to make sure kids were belted in. Was a van of this type ever observed by law enforcement with the usual attention to whether or not belts were used, the same kind of attention they'd apply if they saw me out and about sans belt? I have been pulled over twice for no seat belt. I got a ticket the first time and a warning the second. When I got the ticket, the Morris Police Department made a clerical error that made it difficult to pay the fine. I wrote a whole blog post about this, and you may read via this link:
The second time I was pulled over, I veered into the Thrifty White parking lot to avoid stopping on the shoulder of the highway, and the Morris officer was at least friendly this time. I appreciated that greatly. If it's so important for me to be belted in all the time, I would think that kids in a school van would be similarly watched over. Instead we have a sheriff, John Holtz, who wasn't even sure at first if they were required to be belted. Maybe he should resign over this shortcoming.
I think we all feel for the driver of the van because the error happened in a mere instant - who knows why? A briefly inattentive mind? Such caprice we can be subjected to. Surely it shows the great danger we face every time going out on the roads.
A car-free lifestyle is more practical today than in the past. In fact, it has been said that we can, if we choose, live our whole life without even leaving the house. The communications revolution has enabled this. Young people thus do not view auto transportation as a defining feature of the American life. It's another departure from the world that the immediate post-WWII generation knew. That beloved generation was "joiners." They joined all sorts of clubs and activities where there was face-to-face contact with others. They bowled on teams! The later drift away from bowling was noted in the famous sociological book "Bowling Alone."
Today we use electronic communications to build social contacts with people who might live anywhere. . .on the globe! We live in communities of people with shared interests. Home schooling is an interesting principle but it has gotten cloaked in political and religious overtones. It's also clearly not practical for everyone. So we continue this practice of sending out buses or vans to get kids to "school" even though all the information they might need to enrich themselves is available on the Internet.
The Morris school reportedly contracts with a security firm, something that would have been unimaginable in my days in the Morris school. I must have grown up in profoundly more innocent times. Why the difference?
All the contemporary tech tools (fun gadgets) have created a distracted driving menace that may be worse than drunk driving. And BTW, drunk driving was considered rather innocent, just an annoyance, when I was young. We'd surely chuckle about many such instances. Humor based on being inebriated was once common in our mass culture. Watch re-runs of the old Match Game (with Gene Rayburn) and you'll catch this.
I find the world of today to be foreboding in many ways. We have a clearly dangerous president of the U.S. We vote Republican because we want lower taxes, but what if the deficit explodes, inflation heats up and interest rates jump up? Maybe we've forgotten how scary inflation is. Michael Kinsley once wrote that inflation comes along once every generation. We get scared by it, go through the painstaking process of curing it (as with Paul Volcker raising interest rates one whole point at a time) and then resolve "never again," only to have the next generation come along clueless.
Are we clueless at present? We have a president who is an embarrassment in the eyes of the whole world. How did Stormy Daniels bring him to ejaculation? I guess inquiring minds want to know. Heaven help us all.
- Brian Williams - morris mn minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com
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