Careful With That Flexible Flyer Eugene...

Sent in by PISSED.

Daredevils Ignore Sledding Ban At Raynham Hill

RAYNHAM (CBS) – Raynham school officials are trying to stop daredevils from sledding down a dangerous hill.

The hill behind Raynham Middle School (CBS)

“There’s nowhere else as good as this. This is the biggest hill,” explained a teenager who showed us the scrapes on his chin from a fall.

Their beef is, apparently that the hill empties into a parking lot, and kids sometimes don't stop in time and could potentially wind up in the parking lot where they could be hit by cars. Because of this, they've banned sledding on this hill. Rather than dump some hay bales at the edge of the parking lot, which would stop any sledders from touching pavement, they simply issued a ban and called it a day.

This is what's wrong with our society, folks.

We're too afraid to do something, anything, that might actually address the issue. See, if we out hay bales and some numbskull sleds between then and gets hit by a car, we could be liable! So we'll issue a blanket ban, call it a day, and just... um... hope that people obey it. We're so paralyzed by the fear of a lawsuit that - rather than take concrete action that will most likely solve the problem - we wind up paralyzed by fear and take the coward's way out. There. Sledding is banned. Now no one will ever get hurt on that hill, because it's not allowed.

Of course, when someone does go down the hill - and they will - and then gets hurt, what's left? Make it doubleplus banned? Extra banned? When your first instinct is to throw down the banhammer, it makes it hard to have further action. It's like the idiotic "Zero Tolerance" policies that expel kids for having a plastic knife in their lunchbox or a package of aspirin in their backpack - rather than have a policy with some degree of latitude, it's all or nothing - with no room whatsoever for common sense.

Bans like these accomplish many goals: They make the people at the heart of the ban (in this case, the teenagers going sledding) so inured to government overreach that they stop thinking about it. This allows the nanny state to grow unfettered by questioning voices. The second thing it does is it allows a wider net for lawbreakers, turning people who would otherwise be perfectly law-abiding folks into criminals. The divide between the police and the general public grows wider, as Officer Friendly is forced to arrest young Jimmy for the heinous crime of... sledding? Imagine that call: "We need you to come down to the station and bail out your child. He committed the crime of sledding without a license." It's hard to see just what good they hope to accomplish here...

Then again, this is MA: Leave your common sense at the door.

That is all.