Care enough to save a kid
Hallelujah! It’s Christmas break. The skate park on Memorial
Drive in Hollister is more crowded than ever with young people on
bicycles and skateboards. These youthful athletes careen around one
another while navigating the bowls and ramps that draw them like
flies.
Care enough to save a kid
Hallelujah! It’s Christmas break. The skate park on Memorial Drive in Hollister is more crowded than ever with young people on bicycles and skateboards. These youthful athletes careen around one another while navigating the bowls and ramps that draw them like flies.
A weekend spin around Hollister is not complete without pausing at the park to watch for a few minutes as the boys – users are overwhelmingly male – thumb their noses at gravity. That’s not all they’re thumbing their noses at.
Pausing at the park reveals a dark irony.
A recent visit revealed nothing new. The park was stuffed with kids, and none of them wore helmets. The park is named for a young man who died in a skateboard accident not more than a few blocks from the park.
The same helmets are missing from children as they bike around town after school or on the weekends.
Signs mandating use of helmets are either defaced or torn down. It’s obvious: helmets are not cool.
It’s easy to point to Hollister cops. A little community policing, where a cop swings by and reminds kids that helmets are required, might go a long way.
But presumably, every one of those kids has a parent. Where are they? Why don’t we care enough about our most precious resource – our future – to do what we can to keep the kids safe? Parents carry the legal and moral responsibility for their minor children.
In 2004, according to the California Department of Public Health, 40 children between the ages of 5 to 15 were involved in nonfatal accidents on bicycles. Helmets may have helped in some of those instances.
What about a mom or dad drive-by or two? The power of parental embarrassment cannot be underestimated. The temporary confiscation of a skateboard or bike may be an inducement powerful enough to make that helmet an acceptable burden.
And we all know that when the cool skaters are armored, the rest will follow.
It’s easy to make light of what seems like a trivial issue. But brain injuries are anything but trivial.
