IS TICKETING DRIVERS THE BEST WAY TO GO?

Neville Raymond September 1 2017 

In its headlong rush to punish, our society loses track of the human values we all share in common.   

Thankfully, one police officer in Louisville, Kentucky, did not lose his way.  He was suspended for turning in traffic tickets with fictitious names.  His baffled superiors asked him why.  His answer was as simple as it was stunning.  It was his way of disguising the fact that he could not bring himself to give tickets to real people.  “I had a conscience.  I had a heart.  I started seeing the human beings behind the drivers wheels (D. Johnson, “Police Looking Close at Unarresting Officer”) 

The narrator who included this anecdote in the footnotes of his book on altruism is a famous author.  He conceded that this sort of fellow feeling is laudable in itself.  And it may even be heroic to the legions of drivers who feel they have been ticketed unfairly.  But then, contrary to form, the famous author goes on to state that if we believe that ticketing unsafe drivers can save lives in the long run, this police officer is guilty of letting his feelings run away with his reason.   

Say whaat?  Is this from the same guy who wrote another book that cited scientific study after study that rewards and punishments do not really work?  Is he actually being two-faced enough to say, If we believe that ticketing is the way to deter unsafe drivers.  That is one mighty big IF….Who says that ticketing unsafe drivers is a credible way of saving lives.  Maybe it just makes drivers mad that their insurance rates will go up.  Maybe it makes them hate cops and hyperventilate at the sight of a squad car.  Maybe their resentment drives them to act out in other areas, on and off the streets, and take unnecessary risks when they think no one is looking.  Maybe it even fuels road rage.   

The whole idea of ticketing people rests on a rather antiquated notion.  Punishment is a valid deterrent.  Punishment works.  We slap people with a punitive fine, which may or may not cause their insurance rates to go up - and voila!  we expect them to grow a halo around their heads and go merrily on their way!

In what universe?  It is human nature to resent punishment.  And resentment has a way of making the best person lash out in ways that are not good for puppies and little children.

You want to deter a speeding driver?  Why not just stop him and find out why the rush?  Is he late for an appointment.  Maybe a call to the person waiting for him would do the trick.  We had to stop Bill here for speeding - and since we know that nothing is worth jeopardizing his life or the lives of other drivers on the road, would you please understand and be a little patient and forgiving when he arrives late? 

Who could resist an appeal like that from the cops?

Or what about giving a neck and shoulder massage to speeding drivers?  Wouldn't that destress their bodies and allow them to drive in a more relaxed manner?  I believe they actually make a practice of this in Malaysia.

Something stronger needed?  What about the cop pulling out his iPhone and showing the driver graphic video content of a crash that occurred just a few days ago?  Perhaps on the very spot she is passing through?

Or, taking the opposite tack, what about handing out fresh roses to drivers in appreciation of the fact that they desperately need to stop and smell the roses?  

Of if the cop decides that the reason for speeding is truly urgent, why not just turn on the siren and give the driver a police escort?

You see, there are myriads of ways of dealing with unsafe drivers.  The only limitation is our imagination - and our capacity for fellow-feeling.  The only option that should be off the table is punishment.  Penalizing people by extracting money from their pockets should be regarded as a non-starter.  The money could be used for so many more practical and productive things - like food or curtains or toys or babysitters.  Why should it go to a faceless bureaucracy that is known for wastage and corruption? 

As long as punishment is off the table, we could take a survey and ask people to write in their suggestions.  What are some of the non-punitive or even loving and supportive ways of helping unsafe drivers slow down and become more aware of their surroundings and more conscious of the need to drive defensively.  I guarantee there would dozens of practical ideas that could be put into effect right away.  Here are some right off the bat.  

The peace officer sees an offender making an unsafe lane change?  How about taking him to the nearest park and setting out a couple of mats for doing fifteen minutes yoga?  

Or how about popping a CD into car and sitting down companionably to listen to a Chopin Nocturne or a memorable aria from a famous opera to remind us what life is all about?  

Someone running a red light?  What about using the calming power of touch.  The officer takes the offender’s face in his hands and and looks into his eyes and says, “You are a child of the universe.  Who are the people who would miss you if something happened to you?  Can you imagine if I had to call them and tell them you were an accident?  Would their world not crumble?  Would their lives ever be the same?  Think of all the years you have ahead of you.  All the fun things you still want to do with your family and friends.  Go, hug your loved ones when you get home.   Open up your heart to all the joy that awaits you.  Be safe.”

  No one gets up the morning thinking that this will be the day they are going to be injured to killed.  But there is an abiding need within all of us to live our lives to the fullest.  Imagine if there was someone to call timeout when we forget that basic truth and lapse into driving practices that jeopardize our lives or the lives of others on the road.  

Maybe the cop could give us a homeopathic tonic to soothe our jangled nerves and calm us down.  

Maybe he could give us some wise perspective on how our lives would change if we were to hit another human being who is someone’s father, mother, child.  

Maybe he could pull some variation of It’s a Wonderful Life and drive home how sad and empty the world would be without us in it.  

What if, instead of asking for your license and registration, the first thing a cop did when he stops you is to help you look at the underlying reason why you would break the rules of the road. Maybe you are depressed, angry, hurt.  Maybe it could be resolved by referring you to the appropriate resource center.  

What about if cops went around with the phone numbers of A-list celebrities in their cellphone.  When they find a driver guilty of texting and driving, they get the offender's  favorite actor on the line.  Imagine hearing the voice of your favorite celebrity speaking to you  personally.    “I’m so happy to talk with you today.  In fact, I am honored to be chosen to make a difference in your life.  Im here to remind you that you are important to those who know you and love you.  I’m sending you a couple of tickets for my next movie.  I want you to be around for it!”  

Are you getting the picture?   Do you really think that a bureaucratic piece of paper with a scribbled court date could ever be as effective in making us take stock of unsafe driving practices as all the thoughtful, sensitive, loving ways in which human beings can change hearts and minds?

Do we really think that a punitive option can ever compare with the transformational power of an empathic, compassionate approach?  

Who says that we can’t just tear up all the ticket books and give our peace officers a heart-warming array of options to choose from to get people to be mindful of their actions behind the wheel?  

 

        After all, the motto on the squad cars does say to protect and to serve.  I defy anyone to show me where it says to punish.  

        

THE BLACK-OPS MYTH OF SHEEP, WOLVES AND SHEEPDOGS             

                                                                           Neville Raymond 

 

       

       There is a scene in the film, American Sniper where a father sits around the dinner table and pontificates to his sons about three types of people in the world.  Sheep, wolves and sheepdogs.  Sheep don’t believe that evil exists and are helpless to protect themselves from it.  Wolves are predators who use violence to feed off the weak.   Sheepdogs are those blessed with the gift of aggression who use it to protect the flock.  

The sheep are the mass of humanity.  The wolves are gangsters and mass murderers.  The sheepdogs represent a rare breed of men - the cops and soldiers who live to confront the wolf.  

The entire scene is one heaping dollop of black propaganda - bogus information that purports to come from the good guys, but is actually coming from the bad guys.  Before we get into that, observe how the camera cuts away from the dining table to a schoolyard scene.  The wolves are represented by a bully pummeling his victim.  The sheepdog is the boy who steps in and starts punching the bully in a way which is indistinguishable from the bully punching his victim. Thus a phony duality is set up between sheepdog and wolf.   It is not supposed to occur to us that the circle of children, shown egging on the combatants, could just as easily have used their superior strength in numbers to intervene and stop the fight.  No, no!  That would have taken them out of the sheep role - and completely dispensed with the sheepdog role to boot!   

  At the end of this little charade, the father delivers a stern warning.  We are not raising any sheep in this family!  He then goes through the motions of removing his belt as if to thrash his kids.  The guy could be trapped in a time warp.  You would never know from his parenting style that western democracies have banned corporal punishment for its brutalizing effects, and research increasingly shows that the motherlode of violence in the world is violence in the home.

Leaving that aside, let’s unpack the black-ops nature of this analogy.  As analogies go, it blazed through military and police circles and took the rightwing blogosphere by storm.  Not because it is an accurate representation of reality but because it reflects the gun-toting, war-crazed, militarized mindset that thrives on a politics of fear.  The tripartite division into sheep, wolves and sheepdogs is no metaphor at all.  It is an obsolete reality that once described a pastoral society.  But once it is twisted into a self-serving metaphor, it applies to the kind of society that cannot mount an authentic defense against evil because it has founded its very existence on it. 

   

The basic flaw in the analogy is its failure to ask the obvious question.  

Who do the sheepdogs answer to?

Obviously sheepdogs do not operate in a vacuum.  They may be an intelligent breed of canine, but they are no match for the humans who breed, train and put them to work.  And by humans we mean not only shepherds but those who employ their services.  The shepherd is the most critical component of this tripartite model.  Without the shepherd, the whole analogy of sheep, sheepdogs and wolves falls apart like an elaborate snowman in the desert. 

So if the sheep are people, wolves are evildoers, and sheepdogs are warrior-cops, who exactly are shepherds?  A quick look at the shepherd’s business gives us the answer.  And just what is this business?  You don’t want to ask.  And people like Dave Grossman - who popularized the sheepdog analogy in a book on the psychology of deadly combat, and goes around the country like a hysterical huckster of doom, hyping a militarized police force - don’t really want you to know.  Because the business of the shepherd is an ugly business.   Like much else in the Bible, the Good Shepherd is a myth.  The practical reasons why the Shepherd is in the business of caring for his sheep is to fleece them, milk them dry, castrate them and butcher them.        

So who in society corresponds to the shepherd’s predatory role?  Well duh, the ruling class - the plutocracy, oligarchy, power elite, Wall Street.  Whatever name you assign it, this class exists in relation to the majority of the human race exactly as the shepherd exists in relation to his sheep.  As a predatory class that feeds off the people as the shepherd feeds off his flock.

Its banking system systematically fleeces the people.  Its corporate system depresses their wages, deprives them of their livelihoods and depletes their life savings.  Its mainstream media dumbs them down, much likes its education system, and distracts them with three-ring celebrity circuses that rob them of their thinking, critical faculties and cause them to undergo a kind of psychological castration.  And lastly, the plutocratic power structure maximizes its market share and its lion’s share of the world’s resources by sending them out to be butchered en masse in battle.

Thus Sniper Dad gave us kids three parts of the story.  The last and most important part is left out.  Now that you know the rest of the story, go ahead and wear T-shirts peddled by Sheepdog Inc, sporting slogans like “Shirts for heroes who hunt down evil”.  Go ahead and wallow in a gun culture and learn self-defense from “Sheepdog Seminars Churches.” Just don’t go telling half-truths when it comes to revealing the sheepdog’ s real function.  Sure, it is to fend off the wolves - but finish the sentence, for goodness’ sake!  It is to fend off the wolves so that the Shepherd can be left in peace to guzzle his sheep’s milk, keep warm in his sheep’s wool, and wolf down his mutton pie.  

Truth to tell, many social commentators have exposed the Good Shepherd analogy as the sordid piece of propaganda it is, from Thrasymachus to Aldous Huxley.  It still keeps turning up like a bad penny.   Perhaps this time we can melt it down and bury it in a slag heap for good.  The takeaway lesson is not that there is no Good Shepherd.  Or that the sheepdog is no warm, fuzzy friend of ours.  It is that people are not sheep.  It is precisely because We the People are not sheep - precisely because we rebel and revolt and every so often mobilize to rise up and protest a rapacious regime that treacherously preys on us - that the sheepdogs put on their body armor and snarl and bite to keep us in line.  For the sheepdog’s role is not to confront the real enemy but to provide it with every aid and comfort to be able to sleep well at night.  It is to provide tactical and logistical support and security so that the predacious class can keep on getting away with murder, as it has done for thousands of years.  

  And that is why the Sheepdog Myth is the ultimate piece of black-ops propaganda.  Those who disseminate it purport to be on the side of the people, when in fact they are valiantly trying to pull the wool over our eyes.  They go around acting like they deserve our gratitude for serving as our guardians, saviors and protectors, when in fact they have one job in life that trumps all the others - and that is to safeguard the monopoly of those who exist to prey on us.

IF YOU ARE GOING TO STEAL, STEAL BIG

                                                     by Neville Raymond

             One time, when I was a kid of five or so, living in Calcutta, I was out with my mother in the New Market. 

            As we stopped to browse at a little toy stall, I fingered the tchotchkes on display and managed to slip a few of them into my pocket. 

            Little painted cars, airplanes, submarines - objects worth a few annas at most.  

            On the way home in the car I took them out of my pocket and showed them to my mother.  

            She immediately bade the driver to turn around and return to the New Market.  

            And then she walked me back to the shop in question and made me give them back to the owner. 

            It was a lesson in stealing I was never to forget. 

            But then, starting at the age of seven, my mother would make a practice of driving me to Howrah station, putting me on a train, and bundling me off to a boarding school some twelve hundred miles away, at the foothill of the Himalayas, for nine months at a stretch.  

             She did this over and over, year after year. 

           

            She stole my joy, my trust, my security.

            She stole my happy-go-lucky childhood. 

            She stole the stars out of my night sky. 

           

            And no one ever took her in hand and made her give them back to me.  

AUTISM - SECRET WEAPON IN THE ARSENAL OF TYRANNY

                                                by Neville Raymond

             In the Middle Ages, the burning question of the day was how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.  Today, we don’t have to debate how many neurotoxins can float on the tip of a needle.  We just flip open the vaccine insert and count them all.  Mercury, aluminum, formaldehyde, 2-phenoxyethanol, benzethonium chloride – the list goes on and on.  People are known to suffer seizures and convulsions after taking vaccines.  No word yet on how many pro-lifers are having fits over the discovery that the viruses in vaccines are grown in cell cultures from aborted human fetuses.  

           

        The vaccination superstition was exposed in a book by that title in the early 20th century.  Here we are in the early 21st century and the superstition is still going strong.  To this day vaccines are true to their semantic roots (vaccine, vaca, cow).  The cow pus used back in the day is now bovine serum albumin.  The science on which vaccination is based is as grossly flawed as it ever was, and its clumsy attempt to mimic natural immunity is the miserable failure it has always been.  Its claim to wiping out infectious diseases is nothing more than a bald-faced attempt to take credit for what advances in sanitation, nutrition and healthful living have accomplished.  As for the voodoo practitioners in white lab coats and stethoscopes around their necks, they have to browbeat and brainwash their patients into getting sick from illnesses which have documented associations with vaccines - allergies, arthritis, asthma, diabetes, SIDs, kidney disease, miscarriages and the like.  Who are these people who cause mothers to fall under their spell in order to inject the bloodstreams of children with such a witch's brew of toxins?  Are they to be called doctors?   Or is the right word for them witch doctors?

            No link between autism and vaccines.  The refrain keeps bouncing around in the echo chamber of the media. For those of us who have done their homework, it is like saying there is no link between sex and reproduction.  Believe it or not, there were once ignorant tribes that failed to make that connection!  Inflammation of the brain, or encephalopathy is a well-known result from being injected by vaccines, just as pregnancy is a common but not invariable result of sex.  Given the irrefutable evidence for this chain of causality, the claim by mass media and orthodox medicine that vaccines have nothing to do with autism is beginning to sound like the fantasy of the Virgin Birth.    

                                                                                                            

           If parents would rather not blight their children’s future, the wise course is to abstain from vaccinations.  Even this healthy instinct of self-protection is under attack by those who would ban vaccine exemptions. After carefully planted stories of a measles “outbreak” in Disneyland circulated in the media, the same kind of pseudo-science that once made California the mecca for forced sterilizations is now pushing to make forced vaccinations legal here.       

           As if the odds of contracting a fleeting childhood illness in Fantasyland can compare with the all too real epidemic of ruining your child’s whole life with autism.

           

            Why are swarms of protestors not blocking vaccine clinics and pharmacies, handing out lists of toxic ingredients provided by the vaccine manufacturers?                                                            

            Why are armies of mothers not camping out in Washington or Sacramento, bringing lawmakers up to speed on the century-old research of a Nobel Prize winner in medicine who showed that hay fever, asthma, anaphylactic shock and other inflammatory allergies, like the current deadly epidemic of peanut allergy, are reactions to bits of undigested proteins floating around in the bloodstream from vaccine injections?

            

            Oh, I forgot.  They have been turned against each other by the myth of herd immunity.  The rage they should be directing at those who demonstrably damage their child’s health with false promises of immunization is being directed against those who are too smart and educated to fall for the lies of vaccine propagandists!  What a diabolic stroke of genius! 

           The whole myth of herd immunity depends on pulling the wool over peoples’ eyes in order to lead them like sheep to the slaughter.  That means no headlines trumpeting how courts around the world are awarding damages to parents who sue vaccine makers for their children’s autism.  No investigative TV reports exonerating Dr Andrew’s Wakefield for linking the MMR vaccine to bowel and brain disorders.  No social media agog with news of scores of published scientific studies vindicating Dr. Wakefield’s research - like the 2002 study in the Journal of Biomedical Science implicating the measles part of the MMR vaccine, and the 2012 study in the journal Entropy implicating the aluminum part, in the onset of Autistic Spectrum Disorder.  And no clamor for the Department of Justice to open a fraud investigation against CDC director, Dr. Julie Gerberding, for allegedly covering up clinical evidence linking the MMR vaccine to a 340% increase in autism among African-American kids.

             

            At the end of WWII, the civilized world was up in arms at Doctors of Infamy who performed horrific experiments in the name of science. When the media blackout on vaccine truth is lifted, it will be obvious to everyone that the doctors who pressure parents to vaccinate are no better than these Nazi doctors.  When that day comes, journalists and bloggers who push the Big Lie that vaccines are safe could be tried under the Nuremberg laws for aiding and abetting crimes against humanity.  Can't you just see the ghost of Heinrich Himmler smiling over those who hail vaccines as one of the 20th century's greatest achievements… despise the holocaust they wreak on children's health?  It was he, after all, who saluted a group of high-ranking SS for writing a glorious page in history…despite the mounds of corpses they left in their wake.  

            How many ears must some people have before they can hear the encephalitic cries of children whose brains are exploding from all the neurotoxins bombarding them?  How can vaccine-pushers and vaccine-enablers turn a deaf ear to these high-pitched scream, torn from the depths of little bodies arching to escape the after effects of vaccinations?              

           Does the fear for the loss of their careers eclipse their compassion for parents whose world comes crashing about the ears?  Obviously some very powerful interests are calling the shots here - literally.  Are they bringing so much pressure to bear that otherwise decent people override their journalistic ethics, their Hippocratic oath, and spread the scourge of autism in a defenseless population with indiscriminate jabs of a poisonous needle?   

            The statistics are frightening.  A few decades ago, autism was so rare it was virtually unheard of.  As the vaccination schedules were beefed up, it started to grow exponentially.  Before you knew it, it was one in 500 children, then one in 150.  Then 1 in 100 children.  Then 1 in 50 children – or 1 in 35 boys.  In the next decade the numbers are projected to go up to 1 in 10.  If this trend continues, 1 in 2 children could be autistic by 2030 or 2035.  This is not a public health crisis.  This is a public health catastrophe.

            And it is happening because the medical conspires with the media to murder the souls of our children.  What Hitler gave the orders for this mental holocaust?   If a mind is a terrible thing to waste, who gave the CDC and Health and Human Services the power to trash children’s minds?  Who is compelling good people to commit atrocities that must surely prick their conscience like a sharp needle, if not go against their every moral fiber?    

           

            And for what?  If you look for answers on the Internet, the explanations usually proffered are twofold.  There is the profit motive.  Vaccines are big business for Big Pharma.  Then there is the covert depopulation agenda that is imputed to the power elite.  Americans are gulled into sacrificing their children to vaccines by invoking the fable of herd immunity to appeal to their altruistic instincts.  Meanwhile, the oligarchs are free to go about the business of efficiently “culling the herd” – that is, trimming the population through dangerous, often deadly vaccines.

           

            It hardly seems adequate as an explanation.  Most victims of vaccines aren’t dying – their brains are being scrambled.  And what about the gargantuan cost of taking care of these victims?  The financial drain on the public treasury outstrips any profit motive.   Who in their right mind would add billions to the welfare budget by systematically expanding the pool of vaccine-injured victims who must be compensated and provided for to their dying day?  Yet that is what the legislative push to ban vaccine exemptions will accomplish.  How can society possibly pay for the care of this swelling autistic population as autistic infants turn into teenagers and autistic teenagers turn into adults?  What kind of method is there in his institutionalized madness?

            And then the answer comes like a bolt from the blue.  What has been the most alarming fallout from 9-11?  The proliferating signs of a police state – like the Patriot Act, NSA surveillance, erosion of the Bill of Rights, extrajudicial detentions and killings, etc.  Certainly there has been a concerted push in the first decades of the 21st century to lay down the infrastructure of the police state.  Exhibit One is the ruthless militarization of local law enforcement agencies.                          

            But repression from the top down has its limitations.  People are better informed today, they are more aware, more questioning, especially armed with an education from Google University.  How do oligarchs cement their grip on power, much less expand their privileged position, in the face of a deepening unease among the general population that the invisible government, with the aid of the visible one, is out to intimidate and enslave the American people?  To be sure, they could keep chipping away at our civic right to speak out   But wouldn’t it be easier to just cripple our natural ability to do so?

            Ask yourself, how do you stop people from speaking out?                        

            You could pass draconian laws to silence free speech.                                                Or you could mandate a toxic cocktail of vaccines that robs a whole generation of children of its ability to speak.

           

            How do you stop people from mobilizing together to stand up for their rights?

            You could outlaw the right of assembly, or alternately, you could use riot squads of police to break up the Occupy movements.                                                            

            Or you could just initiate a forced vaccination program that aborts the ability of defenseless babies to develop into fully functioning social animals and degrades their capacity for normal social interactions.

           

            How do you roll back the growth of social movements that hold our government accountable and return power to the people?                                    

            You could inflate the threat of terrorism and stampede people into surrendering their hard-won freedoms by submitting to outrageous invasions of privacy.                                       

            Or you could overload the immune systems of our children with toxic chemicals that turn back the developmental clock and cause them to regress to the level of non-functional basketcases that require round-the-clock monitoring and care. 

            The striking thing about autism is that it throws children into a kind of mental prison from which they cannot seem to break out.  Here is one M.D.’s description of the first child he saw with autism way back in 1989: “I studied this four-year-old carefully.  I could see intelligence behind his eyes but an increasingly high level of frustration was building as it was clear he was trying to communicate verbally and nothing intelligent would come from his lips, just like an old-time phone switchboard where all the wrong wires were plugged into all the wrong connections.  The frustration overwhelmed him, and he lost his composure.”  (Foreword, The Big Autism Cover-up)

            To the average person this seems too heartbreaking for words.   To those invested in expanding their police powers and capacity for world domination, it is just what the doctor ordered!  

            Who needs Guantanamo when you can use vaccines to lock up children in a mental prison and throw away the key?  

            Who needs to shut down the freedom of the Internet when you can inject a four year old with a vaccine and scramble the internal connections in his nervous system so that he can’t even communicate properly?  

            Who needs to break up public assemblies and mass demonstrations when you just frontload a vaccination schedule that rips our children’s attempts at social communication in the bud and hopelessly isolates them in their own private world?  

           

            Dictators dream of gaining so much power that they can tower over people like large-than-life gods and cause them to regress to the level of helpless little children.  Wouldn’t you know it, vaccines have the power to make that dream come true

            No wonder the media goes out of its way to drum home the message that vaccines don’t cause autism.  Once it becomes general knowledge that that is exactly what vaccines do, there goes their crucial role as a secret weapon in the arsenal of tyranny.  No one must know forced mass vaccinations are a continuation by other means of the totalitarian agenda launched by 9-11.  No one must know they are the latest attempt to roll back the constitutional freedoms and rights hard-won over the last two centuries by wrecking the mental and physical constitutions of our children and disabling their right be their own independent persons.

           

            A responsible, articulate, socially conscious people that can think for itself – that is the greatest threat to a totalitarian agenda.  What better way to eliminate that threat than by a mass vaccination program that cracks down on the ability of future generations to mature into responsible, articulate, socially conscious human beings?  

           Aren't we a society that respects the freedom and dignity of the common man?  What better way to make a mockery of our society than by routinely regressing children en masse to a point where they must be kept in diapers in perpetuity!                

                                                                                                         

           That Big Pharma, doctors, media and government watchdogs are colluding to spearhead a frightening epidemic of autism now makes perfect sense.  Imagine that a tiny minority has the opportunity to boundlessly expand its power to call the shots without ever firing a single shot.  All it has to do is give each up and coming generation the shots that will arrest it in an infantile state of powerlessness from cradle to grave.                         

          Do you really think it could resist the temptation to jump all over this opportunity?

A DAY IN THE ABUSEMENT PARK (ABRIDGED)
                              
                                    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. 

 A DAY IN THE ABUSEMENT PARK  (UNABRIDGED)

                                                               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.

            A heads up on the parking lot tram.  Its roof seems to have been built for the Seven Dwarves.  Even my wife (who is barely taller than my 12-year old) had to work at not bumping her head.

           

            At the park entrance, we decided to start with California Adventure.  
            Our first choice, Soaring Over California, did not disappoint.  Swooping through majestic panoramas, like the Golden Gate Bridge, snow-covered slopes, and canopies of redwood forests, was a thrill that probably would never be equaled unless we took up hang gliding.  Even then we couldn't cram so many landscapes into a few minutes. 

            Next was Radiators Springs Racers, but within minutes of lining up we got the bad news.  It had suffered a mechanical breakdown – apparently one in a notorious string of such breakdowns.  Deciding not to wait we headed for Disneyland proper.

            Inside the park, our hope of escaping the Memorial weekend crush was dashed. Turns out we had timed our attendance for Grad Day!  The park was swarming with thousands of teens, converging from all sides, laughing and chatting without a care.  Before noon lines for major attractions had ballooned to interminable lengths and even minor attractions had unusually long wait times. 

           

            Suddenly the calculus of pain-pleasure was flipped on its head.  If the average time for inching through lines for major rides is conservatively estimated from 60 to 90 minutes, our day was consumed by at least six hours of doing nothing but twiddling our thumbs and making idle chitchat.  The payoff was a fleeting series of thrills lasting a sum total of 10 minutes, if that!             

            

             600 seconds of thrills to show for 6 hours of wait time!  And that’s on a good day!  Who in their right mind puts up with a cost-benefit ratio this skewed?              

             At intervals along the lines winding in and out of endless roped mazes were trashcans labeled “Waste”.  I fantasized that cans throughout the park were labeled “Wasted Time”.  If visitors dumped their precious hours there, they would overflow with tens of thousands of hours each and every day! 

            If time is money, as they say, what shall we say of a corporation that keeps relentlessly raising ticket prices while lowering the amount of time we can actually spend on enjoying its big-ticket rides?

            But hey, let’s remember we are there for the rides - and forget about how a corporate policy of packing ‘em in takes us for a ride.  If Soaring Over California had been a graceful glider ride on a sunny day, Disneyland's big attractions pride themselves on their ear-splitting stomach-churning bone-jarring bouts of turbulence. 

            As rough-and-tumble rides go Indiana Jones wasn't that bad.  The kids loved it and clamored for more.  Next came Splash Mountain.  My eldest found it a blast.  From a picture taken of us at the moment of the critical drop, my younger son didn’t fare as well.  The camera caught him with his cheeks puffed up.  He was attempting to breathe at the dreaded moment when the coaster goes over the precipice, but only succeeded in filling his cheeks with air!  

            We then switched gears and went for gentler rides.  Jungle Cruise (which showed its age), the twirling teacups at Mad Tea Party, and Snow White’s Scary Adventures.  Peter Pan was a letdown.   I remembered the unforgettable scene from my childhood when the boat sails over a panorama of moonlit London, with the Thames and Big Ben clearly delineated.  This time around the whole scene was virtually blacked out.  It was like being transported back to London during the Blitz!

            At Autopia the kids got a kick out of acting all grow-up, steering cars around an enclosed track.  They insisted on going back a second time. 

            At Matterhorn the line was like a serpent that had swallowed its tail.  Leaving my wife to hold our place, we headed for Big Thunder Mountain Railroad.  By now it was dark, so we didn’t see how overcrowded it was.  After inch-worming around in lines for close to two hours, we were seated on a runaway train that took us through the bowels of a mine at breakneck speed, with special audio and lighting effects that had been upgraded over the years.  My oldest couldn’t get over the mock cave-in and pyrotechnic explosions.  We sat side-by-side and survived the experience exhilarated.

            So far it was just another day at Disneyland.  The mob scene wasn't ideal, the long lines intolerable, but what else is new?  Nothing in all this led me to revise my opinion of amusement parks.  Then something happened that jolted me awake.  And I got to thinking that while theme parks like Disneyland have much to offer in the way of innocuous fun, there is something about them – some Dumbo of an elephant flying around the room - that we avoid talking about.  It was an ah-ha moment that shifted my perception and led me to think that perhaps that “m” in “amusement” park should be replaced with a “b”.  Then we might just see them for what they are – “abusement" parks.  

            As concerned parents, we want to keep our children safe.  Safe from toxic toys.  Safe from street criminals.  Safe from 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 that flattens their young bodies with 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 hundred-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 which, if it were done to a family pet, would be grounds for animal cruelty.   

            We call it a day at Disneyland.  Magic Mountain.  Knott’s Berry Farm.  A socially accepted way of having harmless fun.  Am I the only one that finds this a little crazy, or what?  Parents pride themselves on being sensitive to a child’s feelings.  We practice nonviolent communication with their budding spirits.  And their growing bodies?  Those we allow to be shaken, rattled, jolted and jerked around, hurled and accelerated through 4-Gs, subjected to bone-jarring stresses, head-whipsawing forces and stomach-churning 100-foot drops!

            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?  The human body is an exquisitely sensitive organism.  Trillions of cells intricately organized into muscles, nerves, heart, and brain. Only now are we fathoming the brain injuries that children and adults sustain by recklessly colliding on the football field.  Perhaps it is 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.  

            It seems we had saved the worst for last.  After my wife had spent two hours holding our place, we had to go on Matterhorn.  As a teenager I remembered it as a rather pleasant simulation of a bobsled ride.  Repeated upgrades turned it into a ride I hadn't bargained for.  First there was the off-the-charts bouncing and jouncing from the wheels, scrambling the brains and slamming the spine.  The engineers skimped on the shock absorbers for either sadistic reasons or to save a measly buck.  Then there was a madcap careening through cavernous darkness.  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?  With mounting dread my heart went out to my youngest.  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.  But 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. 

             Yet the body has its own organic limits, even if fixed-ride park operators refuse to abide by any federal ones.  With their eye on boosting attendance, park operators vie to come up with the tallest, fastest, meanest, scariest ride experiences.  Meanwhile, the Annals of Emergency reported that amusement ride-related brain injury had risen substantially since 1990.  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.  “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.”   
             From 1996 to 200 injuries on amusement park rides jumped 60 percent.  More than 10,000 injuries needed emergency room treatment, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission.  And then there is the anecdotal evidence.  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 was back in 2002!  Did it shame park owners into quitting their insane race to come up with action rides that launch even more ferocious assaults on the human body?  Were they guilted into commissioning real-time scientific studies to determine what these thrill rides do to growing bodies?  The New York Times reported that ten years prior to 2002, “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 the many mini-strokes occur.  We don’t calculate 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 wringer on these rides?  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. 

           

          Without before-and-after examinations of brain and body scans, there is no way to detect the internal harm wreaked on the millions who mindlessly queue up hour after hour for a few seconds of thrills.  Only by running a controlled series of neurological tests on site is it possible to quantify the memory loss…brain hemorrhage…arrhythmia of the heart.  Only then can we say with certainty that two rides a month – or a year or ten years or never - is a safe level of exposure on Mind Eraser or Drop of Doom.

            Don’t hold your breath for that to happen anytime soon.  An industry that insists on investigating its own accidents is not about to throw open the doors to men in white coats to come in and rain on its parade.  Next to nothing is known about the prevalence of roller coaster injuries and deaths because the industry - acting on the principle that ignorance is bliss - quashes every bill that would allow the feds to come in and enforce safety inspections and investigations.  And there is no doubt that if they are left to their ever-scarier devices, they will push the envelope until the aneurism bursts. 

            

            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 partiality for kiddie rides.  They may urge them to graduate to the 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 words and blows – they sometimes do it by pushing us into dangerous situations where we are assaulted by overwhelming forces which no body (let alone a child’s) is equipped to handle – at least, not without traumatizing itself on some level.

            Some people use putdowns like fraidy-cat, which is ironic because if we treated a cat in this way we would have to answer charges of animal cruelty.  They label us killjoys and party-poopers because we get cold feet at the sight of a 400-foot drop or the prospect of 10 inversions.  Let’s remember that a bully doesn’t have to push a child around to hurt him.  He can just push him to jump off the roof on a dare and let gravity do the job.  

            Above all, let’s not forget that counting a newborn baby’s fingers and toes is just for starters.  It is up to us as parents to teach our children to be in awe of our bodies and the intricate, beautiful way they are put together.  As we learn to cherish our bodies, we no longer take for granted the many conventional ways in which we assault them.  Rock concerts are billed as high-energy fun - but high decibel assaults on eardrums cause rapid hearing loss in rock musicians under thirty.  Is the thrill of being blasted at rock and roll concerts worth a lifetime of progressive deafness? 

           

            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?  Are we so deadened physically that the only way we can enjoy ourselves is to become adrenaline junkies and ritualistically offer up our bodies to be slung around and swung upside down hundreds of feet in the sky at record-breaking rates of acceleration and deceleration? 

           

            Why not make our awareness of the intrinsic dangers of white-knuckle thrills a jumping-off point to return to the innocuous joys of childhood?  Nobody has to buy ever-higher-priced tickets for the delight of squelching their toes in the mud or racing paper boats on a mountain stream.  Or the thrill of toasting marshmallows or watching meteor showers on a summer night.  Or the giggles and guffaws from a game of charades.  

             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 catapulted hundreds of feet into the air?  Couldn’t they figure out ways to laugh, sing, and be merry without being pinned against their seats by giant machines and spun around inside a metal centrifuge?  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?           

            There is a whole world out there ready to bring a smile to our faces – a squeal of delight to our lips – a light-hearted skip to our steps.  There are natural wonders and mysteries aplenty to make the hairs on the back of our necks stand up.   All we have to do is to raise our sensitivity to the little things in life – and we can make big happy memories indelible enough to last a lifetime!   

            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.