How much is TOO safe?

A-Ha, the 80's teenage band recently came up with a song titled :"Cozy Prisons". Yes, this is the same band that played Take On Me and The Sun Always Shines On TV. They seem to have bloomed into a rather good band actually.

The song in itself is a pretty, adult rock song. Something that you might hear on an FM adult relax station.

However it's the lyrics that get you thinking.

They basically amount to saying, "Please take off your kid's bicycle helmet once he's done biking and he's sitting on the porch, having low fat yogurt."

Seriously, have we, as a society gotten to the point where everything has to be 100% idiot proof? If so, then look at the message we're sending; "We're all idiots." I sure hope aliens are not out there, watching. They'd sure have a laugh.

Going back to my other post about the ministry of transport's pet-peeve against cell phone users (which by the way I keep seeing lots on the road, daily, mostly of a particular demographic but I digress...) and now, more recently and unrelatedly, when drama hit a family in the area.

Indeed, last week a young girl was found hung in her room by her bathrobe, she apparently had fallen out of the second floor of her bunk bed and, supposedly, the rope from the robe got tangled around the upper portion of the bed, and her neck. She had been alone in her room less than half an hour and she was 6. Her mother was home but, in a different room.

What were the chances of THAT happening? I can't fathom how little they must be. Consider how safe these beds have been made, combined with the constant surveillance kids are faced with nowadays, the usual marvelous timing it must have taken for this to happen just when the mom was looking the other way, etc.

Now I'm not calling them idiots far from it. My kid has the same type of bed in her room and she's had it since she was about 4. She also wears a bathrobe from time to time. No, we don't have a camera on her 24/7 although I'm sure we'd like to.

And yes, we've had to admonish our kid very recently when a friend of hers came over and they were playing "Let's jump off the top floor of the bed".

Nobody got hung.

Now, the coroner will recommend the removal of these bunk beds from the stores and they will recommend that they be removed from the reach of children.

How much is TOO safe?

Cars cost more and more, mostly because of all the idiot proofing components, safety accessories etc. Apparently over half the cost of an entry level vehicle purchased new today, is related to airbags, ABS, All-Trac, and other safety features.

Moreover, some cars have airbags that once deployed, cannot be repaired nor replaced and normally, even a smallish accident which might deploy these airbags results in an otherwise perfectly repairable car, being sent to the dump.

They have driver airbags, passenger airbags, rear airbags, side curtain airbags, Mercedes has even developed a system (get this!) that lowers one of the windows slightly when the airbags are about to go off because, the sheer amount of airbags going off simultaneously in the sealed habitacle, would result in a change in the air pressure, large enough to damage the occupant's eardrums!

That's a lot of airbags.

Now, since we've had passenger side airbags, children are not allowed to sit in the front passenger's seat because the airbag could go off and take the child's head with it.

The problem is that since people don't actually come out of the same mold, some women and smaller men also can (and have been) decapitated by these airbags so what have they done?

They removed the passenger side airbags? You wish.

No, they've embedded a scale you see? Within the passenger's seat, that allows the passenger airbag to be triggered ONLY if there is a passenger of suitable heft sitting on the seat.

Meaning that if you're silly enough to sit your three year old on your front passenger seat, the airbag will not trigger in impact.

Trouble is, someday, someone preferably an American (and their toddler) will get into a wreck. The passenger airbag will not trigger because the scale in the seat told it not to.

The toddler will be killed in the wreck, but some coroner somewhere will decide that the toddler would have been spared had the airbag actually triggered.

So what will they do? Will they develop a camera system that will monitor, in real-time, all the forces involved in the impact, and then decide whether it's suitable to trigger the airbag or not? And if so how much will THAT cost?

Can't we just place all the cars on a conveyor belt and read our papers while sitting behind the wheel, with our helmets on?

"And if you're careful, you won't get hurt,
but if you're careful all the time, then what's it worth?" -Cozy Prisons, A-Ha.