Someone once said to me, "Life sucks, buy a helmet." While that's not a very good outlook on life, you can't expect people to sit at home in a padded room. Certainly I think people can be influenced by what they see on TV. Heck, people are influenced by what they read here.
Take the whole Markey regulation thing. Every time there's an accident, people start saying, "Oh, he'll love this," or, "Oh, he's right, we do need more regulation." In either case, these folks who jump on the bandwagon never stop to understand what exactly he was proposing in the first place. (For the record, the bulk of his proposal would empower the Consumer Products Safety Commission to act as a central reporting agency for accidents. Mind you, that message gets lost even more since he clouds the issue with talk of G-forces and hematomas, so it's hard to figure out what he wants without reading his bill. What's worse is he tries to make his case out of "concern for our children." I for one don't need the feds to protect me from amusement parks and Microsoft.)
What I look forward to is for someone to compare the number of real live accidents, deaths and injuries (and I don't mean knee scrapes from tripping in the queue) from this year compared to last. And I don't want to hear that we'll never know because the parks cover it up, because if that were the case we wouldn't be talking about it now.
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Jeff
Webmaster/Admin - CoasterBuzz.com
"From the global village... in the age of communication!"