by Neville Raymond
It was D-Day - the Thursday before Memorial Day,
2014. Thinking to beat the summer rush, we piled the kids into the
car and set out to storm the Magic Kingdom. Our sons had never been
and we looked forward to basking in their pleasure as first-timers.
At
first it looked like just another day at Disneyland. Some of the iconic
rides were down. Others had glitches that prolonged wait times even
further. It was 'Grad Night', so the mob scene and long lines were near
intolerable. The food was overpriced. Nothing in all this led me to
revise my opinion of amusement parks.
But then something jolted
me awake.
Matterhorn.
Theme parks like Disneyland
have much to offer in the way of innocuous fun. But there is something
about them that we avoid talking about, and it got me thinking that perhaps the
'm' in 'amusement' park should be replaced with a 'b'. Then we might see
them for what they are - 'abusement' parks.
We
all want to keep our children safe - safe from toxic toys, street criminals, schoolyard bullies. But then we suffer a momentary
lapse in judgment. We take them to a place where they are grabbed by
an enraged giant and shaken like a victim of Shaken Baby
Syndrome. They are hurled into a grudge match with gravity where
their young bodies are flattened by more G forces than even astronauts endure. They
are jerked and spun around, bounced and twisted as if caught up in the tumble-dry
cycle of a mammoth dryer. They suffer 100-foot drops and precipitous
plunges that leave even adults with the bottom falling out of their
stomachs.
Most
of us wouldn’t treat a dog that way. And here we are treating our
children - who just a few short years ago were babies in arms - in this
unhinged, deranged, almost berserk way.
How
can we be conscious parents in so many areas of our children’s lives and yet be
so unconscious when it comes to this? How can we be responsible
custodians of young lives and yet allow their bodies to be treated with such
shocking disregard? Only now are we fathoming the brain injuries that
adolescents sustain by recklessly colliding on the football
field. Maybe it’s time to take stock of the bone-jarring,
nerve-wracking, brain-crunching violence that children encounter at a place
billed as the happiest on earth.
Splash
Mountain. Space Mountain. Matterhorn.
Matterhorn? Yes, Matterhorn. I am a grown man in good health, with no
preexisting conditions. I was stunned by this ride and appalled by how it
left me feeling.
As
a teenager I remembered it as a rather pleasant simulation of a bobsled
ride. Repeated upgrades turned it into a madcap careening through
cavernous darkness. The off-the-charts bouncing and jouncing from the
wheels scrambled the brains and slammed the spine. Many times it looked we were going to fly off the mountain
only to be jerked around at the last moment and whipsawed back on
track. What had we let ourselves in for? My heart went out to
my younger son. I couldn’t reach back to comfort him and my voice
was lost in the thunderous din. By the time the ride screeched to a halt,
I didn’t just feel upset. I felt violated. Vowing to
never go again, I wondered how a body could hope to escape unscathed after
repeatedly going through something like that.
Attention-grabbing headlines on roller coasters are reserved for
accidental deaths from ride malfunctions. At issue here is something
more insidious. It is the harm done to children’s fragile bodies
when a ride functions perfectly, just the way it is supposed to. It may not be damage visible to the
naked eye. It is the thousand neurological disturbances that occur
when the human organism is strapped into a mechanical device whose sole purpose
seems to be to push it to the limits of endurance. Are we aware of
the subtle damage done to brain stems, spines, vital organs? Forget
about obvious symptoms like nausea, headaches and dizzy spells. Do
we test for sub-clinical tears and lesions? Is anyone monitoring the
arrhythmic pattern into which the heart lapses, or the microscopic vessels in
the brain that rupture and hemorrhage?
No, no one
is. The amusement park industry sees to that. Its
unspoken mission is to foil all legislative efforts at federal
oversight. Even accidents that make the 6 ‘o clock news - of bodies
catapulted from seats through a failure of restraint mechanisms or crushed by
colliding cars – can't seem to mobilize public opinion in favor of regulation. Fixed-ride
amusement operators have lobbied Congress to remain masters of their
domain. There are no federal guidelines to say that 4-Gs of force is
too much – though even trained astronauts are spared that much – or that this
accelerative stress point or that level of decelerative strain is pushing
it. It's literally the wild blue sky out there.
The
Annals of Emergency reported that amusement ride-related brain injury had risen
substantially since 1990. "The acceleration and abrupt changes
in direction on a roller coaster may induce uncontrolled rotation of the head
with stretching of the cervical vessels and aorta similar to that observed with
acute deceleration in a motor vehicle crash." Tears notably develop
in the inner layers of the carotid and vertebral artery from indirect trauma or
torsion of the neck. Blood surging through these tears can cause the
inner and middle layers to separate or dissect.
From 1996
to 2002 injuries on amusement park rides jumped 60 percent. According to
the Consumer Product Safety Commission, more than 10,000 injuries needed
emergency room treatment. The National Institute of Neurological Disease
and Stroke in Bethesda, MD reported that almost 60 people suffered brain trauma
after being on thrill rides that operated normally. Eight died. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Ten
years prior to 2002, reported the New York Times, “there was no such thing as a
hypercoaster, a roller coaster that reaches 200 feet or higher. Now, the record
is 400 feet. Until a few years ago, roller coasters gained momentum purely by
gravity. Now many are catapulted from zero to 70 miles an hour in less than
four seconds by motors originally designed to launch rockets.”
And
here we are, twelve years down the road, and the much-hyped changes in rollercoaster design keep on
coming. What about the corresponding changes in heart rate, blood
flow, brain chemistry? They may pose short and long term harm,
but they remain out of sight, out of mind. We don’t know the
incidence of memory loss. We don’t count how many mini-strokes
occur. We don’t rate the chances of microscopic bleeding in the
brain. Sure we can speculate. We can draw reasoned
inferences that the body – especially of a child – can only take so much abuse
without suffering a predictable toll. But who is there to measure
it? Who tracks the long-range wear and tear on the human organism
from being put through the amusement-ride wringer? We will never get
hard data on the invisible dangers – not until the industry allows medics to be
positioned at entrances and exits to thrill rides, scanning people's brains
before they get on, then once again after they get off.
So
until the science catches up with our concerns – and until we have a national database
that keeps statistical tabs on the neurological risks posed by various thrill
rides, along with a list of the side effects of habitually or occasionally
using them to get an adrenaline fix - what can we do as parents?
The
first thing is to trust our instincts – our own and those of our
children. If a young child is scared or reluctant to go on a ride,
don’t force him. As children grow older, their peers may be
contemptuous of their fondness for kiddie rides. They may urge them
to graduate to big-boy rides – you know, the ones with G forces that make you
weak at the knees and knock you into the middle of next week. This
is our cue as parents to step up to the plate. Children must be
taught that bullies don’t always do their work by directly assaulting us
with blows. They sometimes do it by daring us to jump off the roof and
let gravity do all the beating up.
So
the next time we plan on getting our jollies by going through the latest thrill
mill, the question to ask ourselves is this. Are we really so
bankrupt of natural ways of having fun that we have to put ourselves through
the unnatural strains and stresses of amusement park rides with names like Colossus and Goliath?
Isn’t
the joy of flying a kite enough? Must we hold out for the thrill of
being buffeted around like a kite in a windstorm? If children were
free to let their imaginations run wild, couldn’t they find ways of feeling at
the top of the world without being blasted hundreds of feet into the
air? When it comes right down to it, don’t children already
have everything it takes to come fully 100% alive without testing themselves in
one death-defying action ride after another?
In
the end, the only thing that limits our capacity for joy and pleasure is our
own imaginations – and our infallible instincts for knowing what is in harmony
with our psychobiology - and what stands to do it violence under the guise of
having fun.
