"Oh, gee! What-EVER will we do? We oh, so badly, want to do the right thing but golly jeepers, we just do NOT know what the members want. If ONLY ol' 103210 would write us a letter and help us understand..."
Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and the bleeding donkey.
You don't need another damned letter, Drago. If anyone who COULD make another option work WANTED to make another option work, ANOTHER OPTION WOULD WORK. On this issue, the intersection between "people who can make a difference" and "people who have any motivation to make a difference" is an empty freaking set. ZEE-RO.
I have quite literally hundreds of hours and my own money into this issue, over the past SIX YEARS, communicating through all kinds of channels about why we're in this situation, why it's a problem for racers, and what we can do about it.
Dick - is there ANY DOUBT AT ALL among the CRB what this group of members think is best for their safety? ANY...? AT ALL...?? Is Drago the only one who's been distracted for the past 72 months or so and missed that these people ELECTED to make themselves safer, before any mandate, and are now getting screwed for it?
Or - as is more likely the case - is this one more case of pretending like you give a whistling popcorn fart about our input, Jim? Particularly if it's coming from me. Best thing I could do for the cause is write in extolling the virtues of SFI, and thanking the Board for making the hard decision to stick with them. One of my least favorite things is "disingenuous" and it's one of the things you are REALLY good at.
"But, Kirk," I hear you say, "your tone isn't helpful."
Screw it. I was nice about this stuff for years. All done with that.
We somehow managed to get to a point where a long list of the things we wanted to do on the ITAC are now happening - all those things that we JUST CAN'T DO according to Mr. Drago - and the world hasn't stopped turning. It took massive upheaval and the loss of a year of productive work but GUESS WHAT...? Turns out that what nice couldn't do, upheaval did.
We are less than a year from the point at which a pretty good list of dues-paying members will, by the mandate of the Club, trade in their current H&N systems for something else THAT BASED ON TESTS FROM THE SAME TWO LABS, DO NOT PERFORM THEIR ONLY FUNCTION AS WELL AS WHAT THOSE MEMBERS CURRENTLY HAVE.
And you have NOT seen upheaval until the lawyers come knocking after one of those people is crippled or killed because of the Board's decision - and the CRB's complicity. Compared to the shit-storm that will follow that visit, I am being as sweet as pie...
...and in that spirit I will repeat it, one more time and one time only. You have an easy solution:
MANDATE THE USE OF HEAD AND NECK RESTRAINT SYSTEMS THAT MEET OR EXCEED THE PERFORMANCE STANDARD, AND ONLY THE PERFORMANCE STANDARD, DESCRIBED IN SFI 38.1, AS TESTED BY ONE OF THE TINY NUMBER OF LABS QUALIFIED TO UNDERTAKE SUCH PERFORMANCE TESTS.
Done. It's all win. You get all of the coverage of 38.1, without any of the liability you seem to be willing to take on by preventing me from keeping myself as safe as possible.
But you won't, Jim, and the Board won't.
Instead you'll trot out a bunch of waffling crap about how tech people are just too stupid to know a device that's passed such a test from something that someone built out of LEGO and drywall screws in their garden shed, absent a little farking sticker.
And maybe throw in some half-assed assertions about how we just can't trust any test results that aren't disseminated through an organization that profits - oh, sorry, "nonprofits" - from making said numbers look all fancified, like the "industry standard" that they are.
Et-bleeding-cetera.
And why...? Because the organization lacks the collective wisdom and leadership to get educated about the issue, take the time to understand the nuances of how SFI works, and actually MAKE A DECISION rather than defer it to someone who's getting rich off of our weakness and fear.
Some "risk management" weenie latched onto SFI as the water wings that he thinks will keep the Club afloat on this issue - rather than making the effort to paddle - and now everyone in the organization is a-scared to do anything but join the cluster of hangers-on... It will pop. It will sink. I just hope someone doesn't die to help you understand that.
You don't need me to fill in another freaking web form to know that a bunch of us think that one of you ought to be brave enough to start swimming.
K
