From a Bump on the Head to Everlasting Death

Posted on December 12, 2004 in Folly Watch Insurance Liberty Medical Ethics

My mother worked in a spinal and brain injuries clinic at the San Bernardino County Hospital. Every day, she’d come home with her tales of cleaning out the trachea tubes for the vegetables who lay there, waiting for the hour of their death. When a patient first arrived, his family visited often. As the years passed, however, the visits became less frequent as hope leaked and dried up. Families carried the financial burden of the undead unloss. Now and then, my mother would hear from a sallow-faced county bureaucrat that the relatives had gone missing. “Addresee unknown. No forwarding address.” The breathing burial mounds kept sucking the air, the saline, and the liquefied mush until the time came to burn them in the hospital incinerator and lay them in a pauper’s grave.

The wards stank of urine and rubbing alcohol. Nurses regarded it as duty watching the gates of hell. Who knew what — if anything — went on in the coffins with frames of bone and coverings of skin?

Ninety percent of the bodies who slumped in those beds were motorcycle injuries, men who thought their heads a forest through which the petroleum-forced breezes must be allowed to pass.

The Libertines say that motorcycle laws were part of the evil mind-control plan of liberals. In fact, the first such law — passed in 1962 — was crafted by boll weavil Democrats in Georgia. Conservatives did not like vegetables on the county dole. The aim of this first law — and all subsequent ones like it — was government thrift. Because so many families disappeared (who could blame them?), brain-injured motorcyclists ended up as wards of the state. It got expensive. Taxpayers such as ourselves footed the bill for the thrill of the wind in their hair that some had to have at any cost.

General surgeon Bard-Parker cites several articles which show a trend in states repealing motorcycle helmet laws and a correlated rise in motorcycle deaths and brain injuries. In the name of “freedom”, a minority of riders has systematically mobilized to put the burden of brain inuries back on the people. Wherever motorcycle helmet laws have been repealed, the death and injury rate has rocketed. Texas has seen its annual rate of motorcycle deaths rise by 30%; Florida’s rate jumped by 21%. We have yet to see the full effect of the repeal because most of those who ride choppers and bikes today know better: they wear their helmets regardless of how uncomfortable they feel. But as a new generation of rebels on the right takes to the road, we can be assured that they will take advantage of the gap in our traffic safety laws to zoom down the highway and go flying from a bump in the street to a bump on the head to everlasting death.

As a libertarian (like Bard-Parker) I believe you have to consider all the costs very carefully before you go enacting restrictions. Is the danger posed by not wearing helmets substantial enough to merit fines or imprisonment? The anti-helmet lobby says no. I disagree. The anti-helmet lobby claims that they will always ride safely, that the only victims are the motorcyclists themselves. Calculating costs on physical injury alone is foolish and short-sighted. First, the relatives suffer emotionally from the uncertainty of a death watch that may take years. Second, the relatives pay the bills for the care of the patients until they grow weary and just vanish from the bill-collectors’ line of sight. Third, when the relatives go AWOL, the state and its taxpayers maintain the corpses.

Cruel tactics suggest themselves. One could just pull the plug when the money from the families and insurance companies stops coming in. One could refuse to pay for any long term hospitalization. These are ideas which repel me. Regardless of the “stupidity” of those who won’t wear helmets and who, like the famed “Sputnik”, lobby to erase good laws, I feel the lives of motorcyclists is worth protecting. Rarely, very rarely, a citizen can become his own worst enemy. Not guarding the center of your reason from shock and crippling injury strikes me as ludicrous. I am for helmet laws: the cost to everyone involved merits regulation of the new riders of the black asphalt.