Seatbelt Laws and other Nonsense

After I hit the publish key on yesterday's blog entry, it occurred to me that the national teen seatbelt use percentage isn't necessarily representative of teens in Laurens County. Last year when I taught at WLHS, I would occasionally glance at the bulletin board that had monthly seatbelt use stats posted and had us pitted against teens at East Laurens. For the life of me I can't remember what those numbers were, but I'm pretty darn sure it was higher than 59%. Being part sleuth or bloodhound, I wanted to find out specifically. So, I called WL to ask. Unfortunately I was unable to coerce anyone to dash out into the hall to peak at the board for me. From the sounds on the other end of the phone I think a herd of elephants and rhinos were stampeding into the main office. They gave me the number of the gal to call with South Central Health District. I dialed the number and got no answer, voicemail, fax beep or anything but about nine rings until I hung up. I then checked to see if SCHD had a website. It does in Idaho as well as GA. From this site, I was able to learn the number of chlamydia cases reported in Laurens County, but not seatbelt use. I give up, for now, anyway.

Then I stumbled upon a 2005 column by Walter Williams about the unfairness of seatbelt laws. Mr. Williams, along with my father, believes that there should be no law that forces us to protect ourselves. I can see both sides of the issue. It's really sad that there has to be a law for that. I mean isn't it human nature to want to protect yourself? Oh yeah, these are teenagers I'm talking about. I have a seven year old son who wants to launch his bike off our roof. Not buckling up would be a no brainer to him. I think that may have to do with testosterone. Myself, on the other hand, I consider not flossing to be living on the edge. I mean if our dining room chairs had seatbelts I'd click mine with every mean. Not because I fall out of chairs often, but if a safety device is there, I use it.

So, I'm curious, what do you think about seatbelt laws? Should there be a law to keep us from killing ourselves? I think if we're going to have legislature like seatbelt laws, we should also have an anti-stupidity law and a law that keeps people from smoking and a law that keeps people from over-eating and a law that keeps people from murdering each other.....oh yeah. They already thought of that one. There should definitely be laws against bad toupees and obese people wearing spandex and miniature dogs wearing designer clothing and misuse of apostrophes and the American League designated hitter rule and Hillary Clinton and raisins and garbage bags that won't open and bad breath.

I think I'm done for now. Next time I promise to write something with a point....