America's Safety Obsession

 

Toughen Up America: The Future Depends on It

I was watching a college baseball game on TV, when I heard the commentators talking about tough minded players. They saw the Oral Roberts Baseball team as being scrappy and competitive. Kids who take risks, like drinking from a garden hose, make good baseball players. The thinking was they don’t need much in life, tough kids just show up and play. I agree, but is drinking from a hose considered risky…really? That made me think about some of the other ways our lifestyle/culture is risk averse compared to say 50 years ago. 

From bike helmets for recreational riders to hand sanitizer in every building, we’ve turned safety into a cult and it's having deleterious effects on our culture.

When everything is dangerous, nothing is. 

Fear of Lawsuits

Covid showed us how malleable a society of supposedly rugged individuals can become. Too many of us couldn’t leave the house without a bottle of Purell and an industrial size box of N95s.   

The NFL has changed more in the last 15 years than any other time in history.

The league was sued by former players in 2014 over misdiagnoses and lost. That’s roughly when the head injury protocols came in. Initially I thought Roger Goodell was earnestly creating a better game. But after the ‘can’t hit the quarterback’ penalties and subjective targeting calls, I went the other way. There is only one thing you need to know about companies that get sued, they have money. In the NFL’s case, a lot of money. Anyone making windfall profits will get sued at some point. Don't focus too much on the details of case. No one sues the poor.

 I don’t mean there was nothing to the lawsuits. But the culture was different and the league wasn’t as scientific or professional. It wasn’t that organized and salaries weren’t stratospheric. New businesses are always freewheeling. It’s the established ones that start protecting everything.

This is where the league is today, afraid of lawsuits, social justice warriors and a woke mind virus that’s destroying everything.

I’m not going to make a case that today’s athletes are babies (not even close) but they are used to a catered existence. I’m glad the NFL has cracked down on the dirty late. It’s a profit machine and allowing defensive players to body slam your QB is potentially expensive. I get it. But all of this tweaking of the rules changes the sport to an unrecognizable degree. There is a good chance we won’t have kickoffs in the future either. Why? Too dangerous. Most injuries happen during kickoffs, can’t risk it.

Fear of Disease 

Like the NFL, businesses got very risk averse during covid. Every company over a certain size probably got the same lecture from their legal team over the possibility of lawsuits in 2020. It’s a shame that so many companies are slaves to lawsuits. They’re cautious to a fault and it has a multiplier effect on everything else in society. Grocery stores didn’t let you return food, retailers didn’t let you try on clothes. All of these arbitrary rules were implemented because of a disease that was essentially a nasty flu strain. Even if a lot of that was just business taking advantage of an opportunity, it was ridiculous. Tulsa passed masks ordinances, likely with the approval of the Chamber of Commerce. If local businesses didn’t want a mandate, there is no way the Chamber would support it.

Oklahoma was one of the saner places during the pandemic too. Some states didn’t allow the kids to go back to school until late into 2021. Kids who get the virus as often as Halley’s Comet is visible from earth, were kept from their peers. The “lucky” ones came back and wore masks like doctors prepping for surgery. More than a safety fetish, this was either outsized fear or opportunism. Sadly, a lot of people really snapped. I talked to a Fed Ex driver who couldn’t even walk packages up to certain doors. The home owners would come out with masks and insist he set down the parcel on the driveway and leave. The opportunists were the teachers’ unions. They used their collective muscle to keep teachers from classrooms, knowing the risks were basically zero.

I’m not the first person to make this claim but it’s clear to me that kids are overprotected to their own detriment. Playgrounds are significantly safer than they used to be. From  rubber flooring and safety slides to restrictive swings, it all has an effect. It probably seems heartless to long for the days of more risky playground equipment just to keep the kids in line. But that’s not exactly right. Like the NFL’s new risk averse rule book, kids see a sanitized version of everything and don’t learn how to exercise right amount of caution. When every play area, living room, jungle gym and school are covered in foam children become reckless. A healthy sense of caution is imperative to function in the world, that’s especially true for children.

Conclusion

Covid exposed our own sense of risk avoidance, and we let the authorities do whatever they wanted. Shut down schools "no problem". Close down businesses "sure thing". Keep people in separate rows at church and the grocery store "just tell me where to stand". Allow city councils to impose masks in public "if it saves one life!" I can’t draw a straight line from safety measures to a totalitarian state, but the connection is clear. First comes suggestive guidelines, followed by health scares. At some point we get mandates and penalties.

 The safety obsession is making us soft and dependent, two characteristics Americans have never been.

I’m not sure how to fix it, but we have to get the money out of the lawsuit business. Why do pirates rob merchant ships? That’s where the loot is. As for parenting I’m a little out of my depth not having any kids of my own. But the good news is kids are naturally resilient. It’s the parents that need to ease up. Maybe don’t wash their hands thirty times a day and prevent them from drinking from the garden hose.

I hope we’ve learned to depend on each other for help and not the authorities. We won’t survive another pandemic with the same freedoms we have now. Buck up a little America. The future depends on it.