It's another of the ironic hallmarks of the times in which we live that Americans are becoming ever more obsessed with contrived legal risks on ostensible behalf of largely mythical physical risks that, in this case, are - or used to be - simply part of being a kid:
As anyone who has grown up around snow knows, part of the fun of sledding is the risk of soaring off a jump or careening around a tree.
But faced with the potential bill from sledding injuries, some cities have opted to close hills rather than risk large liability claims.
No one tracks how many cities have banned or limited sledding, but the list grows every year. One of the latest is in Dubuque, Iowa, where the City Council is moving ahead with a plan to ban sledding in all but two of its fifty parks.
"We have all kinds of parks that have hills on them," said Marie Ware, Dubuque's leisure services manager. "We can't manage the risk at all of those places."
No, I suppose they can't. But since when is it - or, rather, should it - be the job of municipalities to "manage the risk" that parents and children, as supposedly free citizens, voluntarily undertake? There's risk in everything, after all; the only variable is how much risk each particular action entails. You could fall out of bed when getting up in the morning; you could slip in the shower and break a bone; you could slip on ice or even wet grass on your way out to your car to go to work (for those who still have jobs, anyway) and knock yourself unconscious. And there's always the proverbial banana peel.
Risk, in other words, cannot be eliminated, which is what is meant by the term "manage". And because of that, trial lawyer piracy and the obsolescence of personal responsibility will never die:
A study by Columbus, Ohio-based Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children's Hospital found that between 1997 and 2007, more than 20,000 children each year were treated at emergency rooms for sledding-related injuries.
In meetings leading up to the ban, Dubuque council members lamented the move but said it was the only responsible choice given liability concerns and demands from the city's insurance carrier. They pointed to judgments in sledding lawsuits in the past decade, such as a $2 million judgment against Omaha, Nebraska, after a 5-year-old girl was paralyzed when she hit a tree and a $2.75 million payment when a man in Sioux City, Iowa, slid into a sign and injured his spinal cord. [emphasis added]
Were the injuries sustained by the little Omaha girl and the Sioux City man tragedies? Absolutely. Should they and their families be in our prayers? Indubitably. Were those injuries (or the other twenty thousand odd sledding mishaps, which amount to forty per state per year, or about one per county annually, so it's not the "epidemic" it's being portrayed as) the fault of Omaha, Nebraska or Sioux City, Iowa, for the unforgivable sin of having snow-covered hills inside their respective city limits? Hell, no. Did Omaha, Nebraska and Sioux City, Iowa have, or were the perceived as having, deep pockets? Hell, yeah. And that is a much bigger risk to society than any risk that goes with the territory of having fun outdoors.
And please understand, folks, I say this as someone who is both risk-averse and hates snow and cold and winter with a, well, fiery passion, and yet used to both sled and ski in his youth. In fact, one fine sunny Saturday at Mission Ridge, I was gunning down the "Bomber Bowl" run and collided with an unmarked, snow-concealed boulder, sending me tumbling ass-over-tea-kettle and landing buttocks-first on one of my ski tips. Being fourteen years old at the time, I thought I'd broken my pelvis. As it turned out, I only sustained one helluva bruise to my gluteous maximus, but if I had broken anything, I can't imagine that it would have ever occurred to my parents to sue the ski area, even though the unmarked status of that snow-covered boulder might have given them a negligence case. It just was not their mentality, just as it didn't used to be the general American mentality. Once upon a time, risk was accepted as being a part of life, just as what is known, in other contexts, as "greed" used to reside in the private, as opposed to public, sector. Put even more succinctly, Americans used to be much tougher and less whinily selfish.
But that traditional American spirit may not have completely vanished just yet, and may well manifest itself in whooping, daredevil civil disobedience:
In Omaha, the city banned sledding at a popular hill as a test one winter after losing a lawsuit, but decided to allow it again after most people ignored the restriction.
"It wasn't practical," assistant city attorney Tom Mumgaard said. "People wouldn't abide by the ban."
Kids will stubbornly be kids, in short - both little and big.
Almost makes me want to take my skis out of mothballs.
Almost, that is.
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