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.