Ruminations

Blog dedicated primarily to randomly selected news items; comments reflecting personal perceptions

Sunday, July 10, 2011

Mechanized Recreational Fun

People who are attracted to country living, to hunt camps and to sport-recreational vehicles for land and water seem to harbour a death wish.

There are so many who drive all-terrain vehicles in the summer, ski-doos in the winter, and motorized watercraft, who don't quite seem to understand either the terrain in which they find themselves along with deleterious weather conditions and their ability to control a motorized vehicle. Failing to take conditions into account, they obliviously imperil themselves.

To the extent that one can only conclude that this is people, in effect, coming a cropper due to nature culling the unfit. They themselves seem to symbolize that old adage of "survival of the fittest", in their ignorance of their responsibilities to themselves.

As each season takes the place of the previous one, we are given stark reminders through the news media that all too many people appear to be inherently careless of the gift of life.

In the winter it's people drowning in lakes and rivers that aren't completely frozen, sinking along with their snowmobiles, or driving too fast for complete control and colliding with immovable objects. In the Ottawa area no fewer than four people have met death driving ATVs over the space of a week's time.

Usually the focus is on children getting hurt or killed driving these vehicles. But adults are not exempt from such fatal accidents, and five that recently met death were 18, 36, 38, 50, and 83 years of age. One a woman, the others men.

They crash into trees, overturn their vehicles, hit logs driving downhill. There were over 300,000 licensed ATVs in the province of Quebec alone in 2009. And in 2004-2005, almost three thousand admissions to hospitals in Canada for ATV-involved incidents.

The prediction by safety groups is that as the popularity of these machines rises, so too will the the number of accidents and deaths. The Canadian Institute for Health Information and Smartrisk, a national safety charity, speak of most deaths being caused by head injuries.

It is mandatory in both Ontario and Quebec that helmets be worn. But deaths due to head injuries occur with and without helmets.

How to ensure that morbidity due to such accidents diminish is anyone's guess. People become addicted to speed, to the prospect of enjoying themselves, having fun, and in the process forgetting caution.

Editing and further tightening the gene pool.

Labels: , , ,

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home

 
()() Follow @rheytah Tweet