Seatbelt

I don’t mean to make you cry. But I can’t help doing this, it’s important. One of the blogs I read each day points me to other blogs I might find interesting. Yesterday it pointed me to this one. Start here, and read the next few entries – if you can still see through your tears. Some of you don’t click links, so suffice it to say that Jeff dropped his 3 year old daughter, Isabelle, off at his cousin’s house to be babysat on Friday night. At 4:10 am Saturday morning, they got a call that Jeff had been in an accident and had been crushed beneath a car. The 4 posts (so far) that follow are the cousin trying to find a way to deal with the loss, and also how Isabelle is dealing with it.

Everyone has their stories of people who were saved by wearing their seatbelt, people who it wouldn’t have made a difference, people who were killed because they didn’t wear theirs and people who were saved by being “thrown clear” because they weren’t wearing one. The truth of the matter is that the number of people saved by their seatbelts far outweighs the number of people killed by having them on. Also consider this, because by TX law adults are “allowed” to remain unbelted in the backseat of a vehicle: one person without a seatbelt in the car endangers the other people in the car, because in the event of an accident they become a human battering ram and can kill the people who were wearing their seatbelts. See this video for an illustration of that. The video is in Spanish, but I don’t think you even really need the volume on to understand the point.

When we bought the Magnum, Clint made a promise to me that if he got the car he wanted, he would wear his seatbelt – something he didn’t do reliably before. He still has to be told sometimes when he gets in my truck. But if you ever need a reason to wear a seatbelt, it’s this:





and even this:



Tune in tomorrow, I promise not to give a lecture or make you cry. But I’m working on something spectacular.