First published in Column 8 on the 24th April 1991
Dear kids, I was very impressed to hear your school has
started a systematic method of distributing rubbish, and that everyone follows
the system through. (But will my own kids take note?)
There’s a verse from Proverbs: ‘Train up a child in the
way he should go, and when he is old he won’t depart from it.’ Sounds like the
people of Warrington School are getting in on the recycling act at an early and
impressionable age.
Good on yer!
There is one thing, however. I must say I’d like to see your
paper going somewhere other than the incinerator. Hasn’t any teacher yet
tackled the task of bringing a carful of sticky Kleensaks back to Dunedin each
week. How is it their environmental consciousness hasn’t yet been raised to the
point of sacrifice?
At the moment I take a load of paper in Kleensaks from my
shop down to the recyclers about once every three weeks. No, they aren’t full
of books I can’t sell, and true, they aren’t full of sticky papers.
The recyclers is already half stacked to the rafters with
every conceivable type of paper. Any true blue recycler must get a lump in the
throat just walking in there knowing all that paper is going somewhere useful,
instead of up in flames.
It’s like seeing the trees offering their lives over again
for a further round of being writ upon and advertised upon and scribbled upon
and all sorts of other things upon. (Including printing Midweeks upon.)
Shifting gear from one sort of cycling to another. I’m
impressed at seeing so many young kids now wearing cycle helmets. Peer pressure’s
been at work as much as education, although there have been a few incentives along
the way, particularly from PostBank.
Yet the same peer pressure works in reverse for the kids who
didn’t get the early training: A certain teenager I know used to leave the
house with her helmet on, and remove it as soon as she was out of sight. The reason?
‘No one ELSE wears one.’
So they’d all like to take the risk of losing their brains,
rather than be seen in a (Yuk!) cycle helmet. Actually, when her brother swapped
her his fluorescent yellow one, things improved a bit.
It isn’t just the teenagers. I’m more amazed to find adult
cyclists writing to The Listener stating that they’ve never worn a
helmet and they jolly well aren’t going to now. Or that they’ll wear them if
they can do it voluntarily, but not under compulsion. No doubt we had the same
problem when compulsory motorcycle helmets were being brought in – only I’m too
young to remember.
Of course, when it comes to accidents, we know it’s never
the cyclist’s fault, always the motorist’s.
Motorists do have problems with cyclists. I’ve nearly demolished
at least two in my own driving career. But consider this, cyclists: If a driver
can miss seeing another car because of a blind spot, how much more likely is he
or she to miss seeing as skinny an object as a cyclist?
It amazes me to hear cyclists talking about how buses and
trucks try to run them onto the footpath, when all they (the cyclists) are trying
to do is cycle round a corner – on the inside. Even motorcyclists, who will scoot
between cars in parallel lanes, don’t do such crazy things.
The adult cyclists who write letters about helmet-wearing appear
more concerned for their civil liberties than their safety. The Warrington
kids, however, seemed to have learned that one’s freedom to choose may play
second fiddle to a higher goal.
 |
| Cyclist checking electronic device while cycling courtesy Alfredo Borba |
As for the cyclists – I can remember seeing cyclists in London
riding between double-decker buses as they passed each other. The bus drivers
hadn’t a hope of seeing them – or if they did, of preventing them turning into
squashed cyclists. But the cyclists persisted in their right to cycle where
they pleased – as they continue to do today. Woe betide if you get in their
way.
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