OT: for people over 25 years old

Well if they can make wearing seatbelts MANDATORY --because it may "hurt others" - by the loss of one individual of society - or put a medical impact on society due to injury... yada yada yada...

Then will someone PLEASE tell me why t the government cannot OUTLAW CIGARETTES and TOBACCO? I mean - it's not a life necessity -and I think a lot of people have died from smoking - as we ALL KNOW.

why - because it's PROFITABLE to sell cigarettes (for both big business and states, who would lose all those nice taxes) -- and there is NO PROFIT OR TAX on wearing your seatbelt... except oh yeah - states said "hey we can make $50 a crack fining people for not wearing a seatbelt... hmmmm wonder how many of those tickets we can hand out each year..." nuff said..... Cheryl of DRAGON BEADS Flameworked beads and glass

Good question. And I think you are right, that profit and the power that goes with it ... is the answer.

Deirdre

They were "options", though, not standard. My VW Bug had a "sissy bar" on the glove box for its "safety feature"-- and nothing to connect seatbelts to the floor/where ever. Kaytee "Simplexities" on

I don't think that's the why on that one. About 20 or 25 yr.s ago, schools, shrinks, courts, etc. started this crap about how nothing you do is your fault. You are just a product of your upbringing. Well, if the bad stuff that happens to you, (particularly if you did something dumb) isn't your fault, it must be someone elses. And if it's someone else's fault, then they should pay for it. Suing someone became part of the culture. Plus a way to get rich quick. It's spread is a natural progression that will only stop when people start acknowledging that how their lives turn out is under their control, no matter how bad things were when they were just starting out in the world it can be fine now when they're ready to take control again. Barbara Dream Master

"We've got two lives, one we're given, the other one we make." Mary Chapin Carpenter

You have to remember *why* that idea got started, and how it was originally phrased. It started out as an attempt to acknowledge that victims of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse were NOT the cause of what had been done to them -- that these things didn't happen "because it's your own fault". What happened later on was that the original idea became distorted; as a result, we *still* have abusers trying to convince their victims that the abuse happens because of something the victims did.

Celine

any time anyone does something despicable to someone else,they generally try to get the victim to believe they brought it upon themselves. That has been going on since before the beginning of recorded history. Sexual abuse wasn't anywhere near the beginning of the concept. The beginning of the downfall was psychiatry. Freud was just plain nuts. Let's not forget BF Skinner. They brought about the teachings that you have no control, or for that matter, much responsibility. Since they were "authorities" in a new "science", their ideas were quickly adopted by the schools. They found their way into courtrooms via defense lawyers. It's a long and slippery slope, and once it became an acceptable concept, it was in, big-time. After all, why have to make restitution when it wasn't your fault? Why take responsibility when you have no control over your actions any way? Fuck. It confuses me why rational people accept it. It just confuses me period. I give up. I taught my kids that they are entirely responsible for their every action. It's the best I could do. Barbara Dream Master

"We've got two lives, one we're given, the other one we make." Mary Chapin Carpenter

It's sort of like drawing a line well past the safety zone to give you a buffer when the government tries to infringe too far on our personal rights. Unfortunately, it's already gone too far, but if fewer people had said "why do you object to unreasonable search and seizure if you have nothing to hide?" than maybe the horrible things our government is doing to its own people wouldn't be happening.

Sorta like Nazi Germany.

In Oregon, if I rent my house out and a tenant grows a pot plant in the backyard, the government can take my house away from me. Better yet, they don't have to give it back even if it turns out that my tenant

*wasn't* growing pot in my back yard. Yet people consistently defend "tough" drug laws by saying "If you have nothing to hide, why would you object?"

Give the government an inch, they'll take a mile.

Sorry for the rant.

Not so; it was the law that vehicle manufacturers equip their vehicles with seatbelts long before it was the law that users of the behicle must use them. What happens to short people (like me) when states start mandating that we cannot disable the airbags which our vehicles are legally required to be equipped with?

I have to say I agree with you on half this point... I agree that it is OK for laws to mandate protection for those not old enough to make that choice for themselves. Like helmet laws for kids.

That is SO TRUE. I saw the shift to this "everybody wins" culture as I was growing up, and it alarms me.

The problem is that telling a victim that nothing they could have done would have made a difference is far less empowering than it sounds. It's terrifying to think that there was truly NOTHING that could have prevented abuse.

Voice of experience, lest anybody jumps on me for not protecting the weak. I greatly prefer the notion that I learned from being abused and am better equipped to avoid it in the future, not to mention better equipped to ensure that my own children do not suffer abuse.

[Barbara Otterson]

| nuts. Let's not forget BF Skinner. They brought about the teachings | that you have no control, or for that matter, much responsibility.

so how do you explain that SKinner wrote so much about how to control own behavior?

I suppose which one is better depends largely on the POV of the individual victim. I think it would be much more terrifying to believe that there *was* something you could have done to stop it, but you just never could figure out what that magic thing was.

Celine

Hear! Hear! It blows my mind that people aren't up in arms over the drug laws. Not to mention the outright abuse of those laws to fatten govt. coffers at every level. The law was ostensibly written to only apply to drug lords and such, that had sales of drugs as their only source of income, and in doing so amassed mansions, yachts, etc. Not too long ago here in St. Louis, a man was pulled over and a small amount of drugs were found in the car. The judge confiscated the man's car. The man was pulled over for a minor traffic offense, mind you. He wasn't high on anything. The kicker is that the guy is paralyzed from the waist down. The car was donated to him by an organization to help him "get on his feet" so to speak, get a job, etc. The judge told him he could get where he was going in a wheel chair from then on. I don't remember seeing one letter of indignation in the newspaper. Nor one news story where the reporter was aghast at the ruling on TV. Where are we going? And why am I in this handbasket? Barbara Dream Master

"We've got two lives, one we're given, the other one we make." Mary Chapin Carpenter

True; I also think it depends a lot on the type of abuse. Childhood abuse doesn't have a solution within reach of the victim, but as adults, we can take lessons learned from the abuse and (hopefully) use it to better protect ourselves and our children. I don't regret being abused because I am who I am now, and I don't regret being me. Strengths, flaws, insight, experience, and all.

Also as adults, we are better able to make choices that affect whether we are abused. Sometimes we don't want to excercise those choices; for example, the magic thing might be "leave him at the first sign of abusive behavior" and our response might be "but I love him and I'm sure he didn't mean it; he was only kidding/tired/frustrated/drunk".

Am I blaming the victim? No. I WAS the victim. More than once because it took me a while to learn. But the ONLY reason I'm not a victim anymore is that I did take on the empowerment for making a better life for myself, and one of the things that is within my power is ONLY DATING NICE MEN. WITH REFERENCES. By keeping my distance and scrutinizing potential suitors, I was able to stay out of the sweep-you-off-your-feet romances that tend to turn abusive. That was within my power, and once I realized that *I* had a choice, I stopped being afraid.

Mind you, NOTHING I say negates the fact that an abuser (and here I'm not talking about aquaintances who hurt your feelings, I'm talking about people who *actually* abuse other people through rape, molestation, battery, and emotional/psychological abuse, which requires a certain level of intimacy) is responsible for their abuse. Some of them are bad people, some of them are just messed-up, but either way, they are the ONLY ones to blame for the abuse. Knowing that you shouldn't hitchhike and doing it anyway is one thing; picking up female hitchhikers and beating and raping them is another thing entirely! One is foolish and the other is evil.

GET ME OUT OF THE BASKET!

Seriously. I get scared.

Good point. I think we're just looking at the situation from slightly different angles. It's still true that there's nothing the adult victim can do to "make him stop" -- to change the other person -- the only option besides taking the abuse is to get out, and children don't generally even have that option.

It just occurred to me that what I said above (in the quoted part) is very similar to my feeling about religion. To me it is no comfort to be told, when shit happens, that "it's all part of God's plan" -- because this leads to the inevitable conclusion that God is an abusive parent. It's much better to believe that shit happens because of random chance; nothing is singling me out, and there's no propitiation I can make, or could have made, to avert it. So I can just shrug, pick up and go on.

Celine