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Mom's arm-bar has been replaced with a more cost-effective restraint

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By TOM JACKSON tjackson Tom Jackson

@tampatrib.com tjackson@tampatrib.com

Published: May 10, 2009

D

uring the golden era recalled in melancholy e-mail missives spread from baby boomer to baby boomer - uninspected lemonade stands, playing outdoors from dawn to past dusk, everybody's moms looking out for everybody's kids - my mother was expert at the sharp-stop arm-bar.

You know the drill. Parent behind the steering wheel, offspring in the passenger's seat, both riding loose and carefree on the front bench of the 1962 Chevy Impala. Then the car ahead makes an abrupt stop and in a precise, energized unison that would squeeze a perfect score even from the Russian judge, the driver's foot mashes the brake as her right arm flies across the passenger's chest.

Those were the days. No seat belts. No worries. If only government hadn't interceded, forcing carmakers to bolt into our vehicles an evolving series of restraints leading to the cumbersome three-point garment-wrinkling harness, the art of the expertly delivered arm block would not have been lost.

It's physics, stupid

Did Washington even keep statistics back then? Did the feds know, when a collision was unavoidable, how many catastrophic injuries or lives were spared by the well-timed parental forearm shield?

We're guessing the number is pretty close to, well, zero, because even great intentions are no match against Newton's laws of motion, the applicable one in the case of vehicular traffic being good old No. 1: "A body persists in its state ... of uniform motion unless acted upon by an external unbalanced force." (Emphasis added.)

The parental arm: external force, yes; unbalanced, not so much. Newton's second law, reduced to the familiar "Force equals Mass times Acceleration," is decipherable even to the fourth-grader in the passenger seat. If he weighs 75 pounds and the car he's riding in at 30 mph comes to an abrupt stop, you've got more than a ton of unsecured momentum hurtling at the windshield.

Missing the point

We mention this today because Gov. Charlie Crist recently signed legislation toughening Florida's seat belt law. Come Sept. 1, failure to comply will be a primary offense. That is, a driver who is doing everything else right can nonetheless be stopped if he or a passenger covered by the law isn't buckled up, triggering a $30 fine.

Swooning civil libertarians conjure nightmarish scenarios of how the nanny state might next invade our rights of self-determination - let's ban beaches, or Big Macs - but they are silent on the monstrous public costs involved in tending to those maimed or disabled in traffic mishaps simply because they weren't buckled in.

That, cold as it sounds, is the rub. The legislation's supporters cite the number of lives it is projected to save, but compassion is a poor excuse to intervene in the life-and-death decisions of sentient adults.

Making the intervention worthy are the staggering costs of care for lost limbs, paralysis or brain injury that frequently plague crash survivors flung from vehicles. Few private policies provide for catastrophic injury; being compassionate people, the costs pass to taxpayers. Having established that line, we get a say in how our potential clients comport themselves on our highways and byways.

And we say: The arm bar is insufficient. Our nostalgia stops at the emergency room door. Buckle up.

Keyword: The Jax Files, for Tom Jackson's bonus musings.

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