Shutting down sledding hills is inspired by the same sort of simpering caution that keeps Americans shoeless in airport security lines and, closer to home, keeps parents from letting their kids walk a few blocks to school alone, despite the fact that America today is as safe as the longed-for “Leave It to Beaver” golden age.
– From The Economist article: Home of the Unbrave
It’s winter in the northern hemisphere, which means that countless hordes of children and their parents are excited to engage in that timeless pursuit of youthful seasonal pleasure: sledding. Many of us who grew up in colder climates have gone sledding at least once or twice. Yes it can be dangerous at times, but so are many of the other activities young rambunctious kids partake in. That’s part of being a child. Indeed, it’s part of life in general unless you want to stay cooped up in your cubicle or home 24/7.
As crazy as it may sound, many cities across the U.S. are actually moving to ban sledding within their municipalities. The Associated Press reported the following earlier this week:
DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — As anyone who has grown up around snow knows, part of the fun of sledding is the risk of soaring off a jump or careening around a tree.
But faced with the potential bill from sledding injuries, some cities have opted to close hills rather than risk large liability claims.
No one tracks how many cities have banned or limited sledding, but the list grows every year. One of the latest is in Dubuque, Iowa, where the City Council is moving ahead with a plan to ban sledding in all but two of its 50 parks.
“We have all kinds of parks that have hills on them,” said Marie Ware, Dubuque’s leisure services manager. “We can’t manage the risk at all of those places.”
In Omaha, the city banned sledding at a popular hill as a test one winter after losing a lawsuit, but decided to allow it again after most people ignored the restriction.
“It wasn’t practical,” assistant city attorney Tom Mumgaard said. “People wouldn’t abide by the ban.”
Instead, the city has posted signs warning of sledding risks and workers at the site of the failed ban put pads around posts and hay bales around trees. Mumgaard said courts in Nebraska have decided cities must protect people, even if they make poor choices.
The above seems like a far more reasonable response than an outright ban.
Most people realize that cities must restrict potentially dangerous activities to protect people and guard against costly lawsuits, said Kenneth Bond, a New York lawyer who represents local governments. In the past, people might have embraced a Wild West philosophy of individuals being solely responsible for their actions, but now they expect government to prevent dangers whenever possible.
“It’s a great idea on the frontier, but we don’t live on the frontier anymore,” Bond said.
I’ll tell you what. If we’ve lost our national spirit to such a degree that we truly agree with Mr. Bond’s sentiments, then we are in much bigger trouble than I imagined. That said, I’m not convinced his conclusions are representative. True, his words may reflect the sentiment of a New York lawyer, but I believe the frontier spirit still remains alive and well in many parts of the nation, albeit admittedly a bit suppressed and latent at the moment.
While the AP story largely blames the sled banning trend on litigation fears, a writer at The Economist takes a slightly different tack. One that I happen to agree with. For example:
This crackdown on unregulated sledding seems of a piece with the recent American tendency to curb marginally perilous childhood pleasures, such as tricycling without body armour or venturing alone into the back garden without a Mossad-trained security detail. Restrictions on sledding, which often takes place on municipal lands, at least have an apparently clear public basis: fear of city-budget sapping lawsuits.
Several years ago my colleague, striking a similar note, lamented that liability concerns are taking the fun out of American public swimming holes and playgrounds, and endorsed the somewhat saner balance of risk and regulations he enjoys as a resident of the Netherlands. In response, Kevin Drum of Mother Jones drew up a broad-brush list of differences between American and European legal systems, which would seemingly account for why Americans are suing themselves into a society of guardrail-happy worry-warts.
All this seems to help explain the putative difference between America and its European peers. But does this difference really exist? According to a study by Mark Ramseyer of Harvard Law School and Eric B. Rasmusen at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, “Americans do not file an unusually high number of law suits. They do not employ large numbers of judges or lawyers. They do not pay more than people in comparable countries to enforce contracts.
Perhaps this is not as surprising as it may seem. Americans are not so much unusually litigious as unusually fearful, and this fearfulness extends to the prospect of lawsuits. The occasional jaw-dropping award in a personal injury or class-action lawsuit creates, like the occasional terrorist attack, a salient sense of pervasive danger. It’s not that Dubuque or Des Moines suddenly faces a new and extraordinary risk of getting sued into oblivion. It’s just that the risk, as small as it is, now looms larger in the imagination, becoming too great for the no-longer-bold American spirit to bear. Shutting down sledding hills is inspired by the same sort of simpering caution that keeps Americans shoeless in airport security lines and, closer to home, keeps parents from letting their kids walk a few blocks to school alone, despite the fact that America today is as safe as the longed-for “Leave It to Beaver” golden age.
As an American (and Iowan!) I find this sort of flinching risk-aversion profoundly embarrassing. We might like to locate the blame for things like sledding bans somewhere out there in the unruly tort system (and indeed Messrs Ramseyer and Rasmusen do), but we must face the possibility that the blame also lies within. Perhaps it’s better to be safe than sorry, but one wonders whether we won’t become sorry to have made such a fetish of staying safe.
Well said.
For more articles on America’s progression toward a cowering, addled nanny-state, read:
The “Nanny States of America” – Mother Arrested for Allowing 7-Year-Old Son Walk to Park Alone
Connecticut Man Arrested for “Passive Aggressive” Behavior to a Watermelon
How I Remember September 11, 2001
In Liberty,
Michael Krieger
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Two observations:
1) American society has been feminized to the point that nurturing, care and risk avoidance–all quite useful when reasonably applied–has joined with lawyer-fed greed to emasculate many American pastimes that were rugged and character building. It is your mom alternately nagging/screaming/pleading for you not to do something she was worried about and I, for one, am sick of it.
2) Take note: In Omaha, the city banned sledding at a popular hill as a test one winter after losing a lawsuit, but decided to allow it again after most people ignored the restriction. “It wasn’t practical,” assistant city attorney Tom Mumgaard said. “People wouldn’t abide by the ban.”
Here is the complete key to escape our prison. Tens of millions of citizens simply ignoring these “laws” and so many others that are antithetical to freedom of action when not coercing others is the road ahead. I owe nothing to a government that is just a thinly disguised criminal syndicate other than enough discretion to revolt in such a way that allows me to live to fight another day. With the present psychopathic trajectory of government at all levels, I will never again be shamed into obeying strictures–not law in any commonsense term–that are established to protect the System and not We the People.
This BS is, unfortunately, all too common.
From 1998:
http://everything2.com/title/Local+cop+tries+to+embarrass+city%252C+fails
I’ll go sliding(what we call sledding ’round here since to us sledding involves a ski-doo/snowmobile) the way I want to. I’ll go when I want to. Now I personally am past that age for the most part and don ‘t have children so it’s not on my list of activities but if you think you can ban that, or regulate it, you gotta another thing coming.
Hello – I’ve been waiting a few weeks to get my comment here past moderation –
http://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2014/12/12/whats-up-you-f-ing-n-r-what-a-debt-collector-hired-by-bank-of-america-said-to-a-customer/
I see you’re back now and so hopefully will add it. If you’d like the last word, you may have it – I just wanted an opportunity to present the traditional Catholic position.
Congrats on your trip.
I’ll get it up with a response soon. Very behind on everything at the moment.
My guess is they are just cracking down on any entertainment people can engage in for free.
You might have a point there. They are trying to regulate everything and make it so people have to spend money to do anything recreational.
Dubuque is my hometown. The two parks where sledding is still allowed are really the only two parks that are really used for sledding by the public anyway. Most of the others are tucked away in neighborhoods. Flat land or hemmed in by fences/landscaping. Poor sledding even if you were interested.
Besides, sledding is a “sport” of the days of yore. Anyone remotely inclined to the wintery outdoors – and has the leisure time/resources – snowboards or skis or snowmobiles.
Dubuque did what a lot of towns do. They made a very public show for insurance coverage purposes and yet nothing about the status quo has really changed.
Sledding isn’t ‘days of yore’. It’s something kids can do near home, after school, no parental guidance or transportation needed
Another prime example of the consequences of an out of control legal system which has created the “nanny state” where every possible thing that might hurt you must be outlawed…
Being 66 yrs old and having grown up in the 50’s and 60’s all I can say is this sure isn’t the country I grew up in and remembering what it was like it’s not the country I would have wanted to grow up in. In a funny sort of way most people I know in and around my age group are glad we were born when we were. These kids can have their empty room with their Facebook Account and smartphones, we’ll take our sled rides and impromptu baseball games after school any day.
Soon to come to the once great America from all the corrupt communists and foreigners YOU voted for: Breathing masks with meters to monitor and restrict intake of oxgyen and exhale of CO2 “for the benefit of the environment” – be a greenie sicko or DIE.
This is nuts…really, put up the signs….. It makes no sense to restrict what most people know as lifelong memorable childhood activities. Are they going to restrict ice skating, roller skating, skate boarding????? What about bicycle riding? Occasionally things happen in every situation. One time a woman who was not watching her toddler found him in my yard with a skinned knee. She rang my doorbell wanting a lawsuit. Hey…I told her to how a mom cares for such things and wait a few days. Must have been her firstborn….but I do believe the faults lie with the courts. They are handing out insane judgments. They are letting people get away with things like that. Spilled hot coffee??? come-on! Its not justice….its nothing but a game to the lawyers, kinda like Monopoly with real money and the real estate being and reasonings, assumptions and downright lies! Have enough of those and you win the money, no matter who gets hurt or whose lives or families they destroy. We’ve come a long way baby, and this nation needs to go back into the hands of reasonable people.
In many states farms and stables have signs that there is no liability to the owners because of the basic risks of rural life and animals. Why not make this true for sledding hills? It’s a simple law…and a simple sign.