Click This, Johnny Law

Stick it to the Man: Unbuckle your seatbelt.

by Brian Hickey

If it weren't for a seat belt, somebody else would have written this column. Because I'd be a dead man. For about 10 years now.

Long story short: I was driving too fast. Way too fast. And way too reckless, like only an indestructible 23-year-old can. Somehow, I ended up hitting a patch of wet leaves on a curve in the road. Never saw it coming (kind of like the deer I'd crunch a few years later in what I now refer to as Near-Death Experience Vol. 2). The car must have spun around three, four times across the opposite lanes, shoulder and curb before slamming into a concrete barrier — ironically — in front of an insurance-company office.

Picking shards of glass from my teeth and feeling the pain of what would become one hellafied forearm bruise, I looked over to where the passenger seat used to be. The door was pushed in to the center console.

Good thing I was alone, was my first groggy thought. Thank God the car had made that one last half-rotation, was my second. And thank you, Mr. Seat Belt, for keeping my head from blasting through the windshield, was the last.

Yet during my subsequent decade on borrowed time, I've not once told somebody getting into my car that they need to buckle up, lest I make them walk. Because it's an annoying, borderline pussy mantra that, quite frankly, we all learned in grammar school. If I'm not going to remind my fellow Philadelphians to look left, right and then left again before crossing even the emptiest of streets, I'm sure as hell not going to urge them to click it. Guess I think people should be allowed to take whatever personal risks they want so long as they don't endanger anybody else's well-being. Their life; their choices.

All of which I share to help explain how sick and tired I am of John Q. Law. Specifically, his penchant for wasting valuable time and resources to run a cute li'l Click It or Ticket annual public-awareness campaign in which officers nationwide have been setting up shop on our roadways, stopping cars with unbelted passengers or drivers and hitting them up for about 48 bucks a pop. (The program, mind you, doubles as a way around pesky reasonable-suspicion laws.)

No, I didn't get hit with one; this is not that kind of rant. Without thinking, I buckle up whenever I drive. It's just that I'm pretty sure the men and women of Delaware Valley law enforcement have some bigger things they ought to be worrying about.

Like picking up the homicide clearance rate, for starters.

And protecting kids from online whackjobs who think it's OK to ask 12-year-old girls what they wore during recess today.

And maybe pitching in down at the ports to help the Coast Guard ensure dirty bombs don't slide past the sensors and into Independence Mall.

These are the things that any self-respecting police officer wants to be focused on. It's why they got into the business in the first place. Even the ones forced to live with the devastating memories of pulling up to the type of collision that should exist only in a horror-flick director's mind.

Yet here we are, thanks to the 993,080 brilliantly spent dollars that the federal Division of Highway Traffic Safety granted to Pennsylvania law enforcement, listening to incessant commercials about how they're out there looking for you, shameful safety-belt scofflaw. And, if you don't heed their zero-tolerance words, you're getting a ticket, savage.

There's no other way to describe this than as a colossal waste, especially when you consider that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration doled out $10 million for advertising alone to put on the motor-vehicle-code equivalent of a dental hygienist reminding you to floss.

Listen, I'm all for saving lives. Nobody wants the blood to flow too red on the highways. But when you look at the statistics, only a fool can't see that this is money better spent elsewhere. (Like to fill massive potholes that bottom out cars and lead to gaper delays on a daily basis, even.) In 2006, the click-it monitors discovered that 86.3 percent of the drivers they encountered were belted. In Jersey, just one out of 10 wasn't. It's hardly an epidemic, even when you consider the NHTSA's assertion that belts give you a 45 percent better chance to survive a crash in a sedan and 60 percent in a pickup.

Yet, next May, we'll start hearing it all over again, even if seat-belt awareness is a battle the government's already won. The more I think about it, the closer I get to the point that what's left of that indestructible 23-year-old is tempting 33-year-old me to take the old Corolla out for a long drive, sans seat belt, to stick it to the Man. Of course, that's not going to happen. Because like most Pennsylvanians, I don't need a boondoggle of a PR campaign to teach me a lesson I learned long ago.

(hickey@citypaper.net)