Buckle Up

Looking like Oslo out there in the sky this morning.  Cold, but no one has an issue with a clear cold. We’ve got the radio on in this cab.  It’s set to traffic news.  It wouldn’t be where I’d turn the dial were it mine to turn.  A young lady with standard mandarin and gent with a thick Beijing brogue have been talking for fifteen minutes about how important it is to buckle your seat belt.  On the one hand, this seems fairly straightforward.  “Buckle up.”  Is there much more to say?  Apparently so.  The government, it seems, has organized a large conference involving, among others, German auto manufactures who also attest to the importance of the seat belt. 

So it’s a national educational initiative.  The U.S. was no different.  When I was young no one wore seat belts.  I can remember the awkward “uncool” feeling at the age of ten when someone’s mom insisted we put them on.  Now it is the exception that someone does not.  Behavior was changed by a national education initiative.   “Propaganda”, which is not a bad word in China, is required and employed to change public opinion. 

And it is the process of observing another civilization, go through what your own already takes for granted that is jarring.  Indeed, it feels uncool.  I may be gazing through rose tinted shades but I seem to recall our efforts were perhaps a bit pithier.  I can’t imagine WINS News or some other New York news radio doing more than a thirty-second blurb, rather than a fifteen-minute deep dive, with voices emphatically agreeing on the need for seat belts.

 

In the spirit of candor, I’m sitting in the back of a cab and I do not have a seat belt on.  So our pithy time honored propaganda was, in my case, only so successful.   I never strap on a seat belt in the back of a car.  If someone insisted it would, again, feel uncool. I see the big padded seat in front of me and imagine that if I plowed into it, I’d probably be OK.  I also rationalize that in China we never end up going very fast so even if there were a smack up, it would only be so bad.  But these are all excuses.  More uncool propaganda is in order.