“Seat belts”

I absolutely refused to wear “safety belts” when I first started driving. After all, they were completely optional then, and as a strapping 16 year old I was invincible, completely immune to even the possibility of becoming involved in an auto accident.

Then one by one I started hearing about people my age and younger who had lost their lives in accidents, and the police on the scene usually opined that they likely would have survived had they been buckled up. It took a while for me to become convinced, but by the time the Commonwealth of Virginia enacted a mandatory seat belt law, I had already been using mine for several years.

I guess my initial stubbornness regarding the use of seat belts stemmed from my experiences as a child. Back in the 1960′s my family made frequent 300 mile road trips, and not a one of us ever buckled up. In fact, the first cars I can remember riding in didn’t even have seat belts! And what happened when we bought our first car that had them? My dad cut them out!

There the whole bunch of us would go, riding for hundreds of miles at a time down a busy two-lane highway, sitting in the seats, in the floorboard, on each other’s laps… and all without a trace of a safety belt. I can even remember sleeping up on the back dashboard where I would come rolling off into the seat below whenever dad slammed on the brakes!

Now I’m not criticizing dad and mom in the least. Times were different then because most cars didn’t have seat belts at all, and the ones that did were almost always driven by people who thought them to be more of a nuisance than a safety feature. Our family was just like every other family of the era. But as I grew older and wiser, I came to realize that we had all been wrong – just like every other family.

It’s hard to understand why some people still refuse to buckle up in this day and age, especially with the local TV newscasters providing the gory details of yet another traffic fatality virtually every day. I guess they’re a lot like the misguided folks who refuse to wear a helmet when riding a motorcycle. “Surely it can’t happen to me – I’m invincible!”