People old enough to remember the Before Time – i.e., the time when in most everyday matters, people who weren’t causing harm were generally free to do as they liked – know what it was like to be a parent or a child and go for a drive in those times.
As opposed to what it’s like now. More finely, – what it requires you to have and to pay for now.
J.D. Vance, Trump’s vice-president pick, got heckled for saying out loud that government-mandated “safety” seats for kids are an effective form of birth control. But he’s right. For at least two reasons that have nothing to do with the cost of the seats, themselves.
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The first is the disincentive to have kids knowing that if you do, you’ll have to deal with “safety” seats for years to come. In some states, until the kid is a near-teenager. That is a long time to have to spend every day strapping a kid in and out of a “safety” seat every time you drive somewhere with a kid in the car. It makes you not want to drive anywhere. It makes you not want to have kids – so you can drive without having to first deal with strapping a kid into the seat and then unstrapping the kid when you get where you were going. This probably adds at least five minutes to every trip, which doesn’t sound like a lot but it adds up and not just in terms of the time spent.
It costs ease and spontaneity and – yes – fun.
It is dreary to have to deal with these got-damned “safety” seats all the time. Even to watch some other poor bastard dealing with them makes you not want to deal with them. But the only way you can avoid having to deal with them – legally – is to avoid having kids.
Voila!
Of course, the immediate heckle that sallies forth is that if you don’t want to deal with strapping kids in and out all the time, you are a selfish person who does not care about the “safety” (gag me) of your child.
Really?
So all the parents who didn’t strap their kids in and out for all those decades before the neurotics and busybodies and control freaks (I repeat myself) succeeded in getting mandatory child-seat laws passed beginning in the ’90s were selfish people who didn’t care about the “safety” of their kids? And all those Gen X and Before Time kids who grew up free to just jump into the back seat or the front seat or the rear-facing jumpseat in the Vista Cruiser wagon were put in danger by their selfish, uncaring parents?
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I was one of those kids and never felt that. Also, I never got hurt, either. But I did love to go for a ride in my parents’ car. And they seemed to enjoy it, too. We all liked cars – and driving – which is what “safety” seats cause us to dislike now.
More finely, I and many others dislike this neurotic obsession with risk that’s disproportionate to the costs of mitigation.
There is always a degree of danger when riding in a car. It may be hypothetically greater to ride in car not buckled-up or not strapped in (if you’re a kid). But just because something might happen does not mean it will. And obsessing over the might is . . . neurotic. In the Before Time, only neurotics strapped their progeny into “safety” seats. Just as in the Before Time, only neurotics walked around in public wearing “masks.”
But that was before neurosis metastasized and became normalized. In this time, a parent who does not strap the kid in is regarded much the same as one who who refused to “mask” the kid.
It is a different manifestation of the same illness.
