(3)
Thundering silence on seatbelts
I was on the tarmac at Malton Airport when the Leafs brought their first modern-era Stanley Cup home from Chicago in April 1962 – you could do that then.Even when some of the ownership was in jail and the rest deserved to be – well, my fandom for the Maple Leafs knew/knows no bounds.
One corollary is that whoever joins the Leafs becomes my hero.So when Brian Burke became our general manager, he became the greatest general manager ever, even if I also had to hate him when he was with Vancouver and Anaheim.
So the recent death of his son Brendan hit close to home.
Nothing can be as tough for a parent as losing a child. My personal sympathies go out to the entire Burke family.
But there are three things that bugged me about how Burke's death was covered. The first two are the two things that every media outlet mentioned:
That it was an "accident." No, it wasn't. Traffic crashes are not "accidental." They're almost always the result of predictable events, almost always driver error but occasionally mechanical failure, and are again almost always preventable.
That Burke was gay. Hockey may be the least gay-friendly major sport, so it was a big deal when he came out in public last fall. But as part of a report on his death in a car crash, his sexuality couldn't have been less significant. A young man died – two young men, actually; sympathies also to friends and family of Mark Reedy. That's the story.
The third thing is something not a single media outlet mentioned: whether Burke or Reedy were wearing their seatbelts at the time.
I don't know if they were. I don't even know if the family knows.
But somebody has to know. At least, the police officers or paramedics who pulled them from the wreckage. Surely it's in the police report on the crash. Why isn't this fact in every media report, too?
Maybe they were belted. Maybe it wouldn't have made any difference. Being T-boned by a pickup truck is a tough crash to survive.
But they were in a big SUV – a Jeep Grand Cherokee, according to reports. They had a lot of metal around them, not that that's any guarantee.
And the pickup truck driver who also went through some serious deceleration in the collision, was uninjured. Maybe he was belted?
I don't know that either.
Maybe it's harsh to bring this up now, when the grief is so strong.
But at times like these, victims' families – mine was one of them, as regular readers will know – look for ways in which these tragedies might have some meaning in the larger scheme of things, that maybe the rest of us can learn something from their deaths.As I said, some crashes none of us could survive. But wearing a seatbelt is the most important thing we can do to increase our odds.
We all owe it to ourselves, to our society, and to our friends and families, to avoid having them go through the suffering the Burke and Reedy families are going through, to do whatever it takes.
Which is why I believe the media owe it to the victims to encourage us to do whatever it takes.
Which means every report on a crash must say that it was just that: a crash or collision, not an accident.
And every report must include a reference to whether the victims were wearing their seatbelts or not.
I'm not sure if the upper echelons of the Star read these rants of mine. They probably do, to make sure I'm not libelling somebody.
I sure would like to hear that they make this a policy for the Star.
How about it?
We have to start somewhere.
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