jawfish

Ralph the Nanny
john posted in politics & culture on June 8th, 2005

Nader is at it again. After hijacking the feeble Green Party and helping elect Bush, he’s back to calling for a consumer safety scrum.

He is not forgiven for trashing the Corvair, the first lightweight compact car from GM. Except for one major flaw ( the 90 degree fan belt ) it was a great little car. So good it was quite successful in SCCA racing against Porsches. But I digress.

Today Nader’s group called League of Fans released a Nader Statement calling for increased sports safety. That sounded good to the parent of a soccer player, but read on.

samples:
“…reported in the May 2, 2005 edition of the Montgomery Blair High School (Silver Spring, MD) newspaper Silver Chips, Erica Nowak, now a senior, sprained her ankle during a lacrosse game in 2002 but returned to play two days later against her doctor’s warnings and now suffers the painful consequences of poor injury management…. ”

“…death of six-year old first-grader Zachary Tran from Vernon Hills, Illinois. According to Brooke de Lench, Editor-in-Chief of MomsTeam.com, the official cause of death was cardiac arrest due to massive head injuries. But had the soccer goalpost that fell on him during practice been secured…”

and more reasonably,
“One example of a potentially successful injury prevention measure is the use of breakaway bases, as opposed to stationary bases, on baseball and softball fields. Baseball and softball have long been plagued, and continue to be plagued today, by injuries due to sliding into stationary bases.”

A player has an ankle injury and some poor kid is hit by a falling goal post? This constitutes a crisis? Oh, sports injuries in general cost umpteen billion dollars, and pediatricians are worried that they are seeing too many kids with sports injuries. Look we are also having a hysterical fit over childhood obesity, and any American parent will tell you that kids don’t play sandlot sports any more. The ( middle-class ) kid world is now made up of video games, television, and scheduled activities, organized sports among them. Except for poor kids, the daily pickup game is a thing of the past. I grew up playing in a park with a concrete storm sewer lid about 12 inches high right inside the first base line. Was there a crisis in storm sewers every time somebody tripped over it? New York kids played stickball in the street. That was really safe. In addition, girls now do sports too, AYSO and club soccer is roughly 50% girls in my town, so there’s a bigger statistical base to fret about.

No doubt there are sensible equipment changes like breakaway bases and better artificial turf, but requiring a defibrillator at every kid’s game? Does he know how hard it is to get somebody to referee? Who’s paying for an expensive defib box? The immigrant kids already have a hard time paying the fees.
Hello Ralph, kid’s sports are volunteer organizations, staffed by the parents. Even High School varsity teams are not funded by the schools any longer. What does he want, OSHA for sports?

Mine safety regulations are a great idea, and China could sure use some now. Regulations that protect workers from dangerous cost-cutting practices make sense too. But really, amateur sports? I think the parents, the coaches ( who are also parents – who else would do it?) and the local medicos can do a much better job of deciding what’s right for our kids than some damn federal task force.
What’ll they call it, No Child Left Untaped?

Do the Republicans pay this guy under the table or what? he’s the best thing to happen to them since Monica, who may have been paid too, according to totally unsubstantiated, frivolous and rude rumor.