Spare the belt, spoil
the roadways

Not turkeys, in the "gobble, gobble" sense, but in the, "hey, dumb bell, put on your seat belt" sense.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Hawaii has one of the highest rates of seat belt use in the country.

This means either that people have figured out that wearing a seat belt while speeding along in several thousand pounds of screaming metal is a good idea or that evolution is working and the turkeys who don't wear seat belts are being gradually culled from the gene pool.

Hawaii's mandatory seat belt law isn't necessarily responsible for 95 percent of us belting up. Arizona, the only state with higher seat belt usage, has no seat belt law. It just has lots of long, open highways where if two speeding cars attempt to occupy the same physical coordinates, nobody's going to be walking away.

I've never been a big fan of seat belt laws for adults because I figured you can only look out for turkeys for so long before they're served up on a platter. I do favor the mandatory restraint of children, not only in vehicles but at most other times, too. Ironically, which is to say, stupidly, while children have to wear a seat belt in cars, those over 16 can ride tether-free in the back of pickup trucks. The highway safety folks ought to see if Hawaii is the only state that requires dogs to be restrained in the back of pickups but not teenagers.

I always wear a seat belt, even while sitting at my desk. I guess I'm becoming cautious in my old age.

I'm not surprised that so many people in Hawaii wear seat belts. I don't know anyone who doesn't. In fact, the only person I've heard of who doesn't wear a seat belt is University of Hawaii football coach June Jones.

You might recall that in 2001 Jones tested what happens when a soft, organic object (June Jones) riding in a rapidly moving metal object (Jones' Lincoln Town Car) comes into contact with a large, stationary object (concrete freeway support). In a splendid disregard for the physics involved, Jones chose not to wear his seat belt and the results of the marriage of man, machine and masonry was, well, messy. Jones eventually recovered from serious injury and now suffers only from a strange fixation for the run-and-shoot offense and occasional propensity to say "gobble, gobble."