The Parasitic Thought Process

Do you remember when public pools had diving boards? How about long car trips with the family and lying down in the back of the station wagon to sleep? How about your dad letting you steer the car on deserted back roads while you sat in his lap? Or even riding in the back of a pickup truck on a warm afternoon?

I miss those things. I think the reason I miss them is that I now have a son who will never get to experience them. Some of the activities or items listed above were removed from society because of the populace at large not being able to take responsibility for their own actions – more to the point, their own stupidity.

I am speaking specifically about the diving boards.

Little Bobby-Joe climbs up onto the diving board and jumps off, landing in the water and closely supervised by his mother or father, wading in the deep end to encourage him and help him if needed. Next up is Marty. He is in his upper teens and wants to impress a young thing that has caught his eye. Marty’s parents are not at the pool, as he is old enough to swim alone. He jumps off of the diving board and tries to splash the object of his interest by jumping to the side instead of jumping to the middle, like anyone with any sense would. He overdoes the jump and lands with a sickening crack on the side of the pool. The lifeguards jump up and do their job; paramedics arrive and take him away.

Marty’s parents – hell, it could have just been Marty himself – decide that the city of Austin (where the pool is located) and the diving board manufacturer are to blame for the complete loss of use on his right side. So what do they do? They file a lawsuit. Not only that, they win it because the insurance company is the only one that pays, right? It won’t hurt the insurance company. They have TONS of money!

This is a true story that happened at a pool at which my brother and I worked. It is my belief that the inability to accept responsibility for one’s own actions, coupled with a desire to hit a big payday and have no more financial worries, is the reason some – NOT all, but SOME – of our innocence as a society has been lost.

It is further my belief that the loss of this innocence will only continue until we act as a majority to really hit hard those individuals and organizations that file these frivolous lawsuits and try to frame up the “big corporations” to get rich.

These lawsuits are more than ridiculous, they are evidence that we, as a nation, are only in it for our individual selves; that we, as a nation, truly are the laziest people on Earth.

This has no hidden racial or ideological message. People of every race are guilty because this is a SOCIETAL dysfunction. We have to work as a society to rid ourselves of this parasitic thought process. Regain the pride in doing a good job. Make more of yourself than what is expected of you.

I now step down from my soapbox.