Pinthouse Pizza
Diving Boards the Canaries in the Mine
RECEIVED Thu., May 31, 2007
Dear Editor,
The key to our urban density issues is on last week's cover [June 1]. Forget that nobody you know can afford a condo Downtown; forget that nobody you want to know would buy into the suburban wasteland. If one looked closely at the cover of the Chronicle last week, one would see Deep Eddy Pool, and hovering above – a diving board! Look around town – I've only found two. Now I don't know what year that photo of Deep Eddy was taken, but I'm sure in those days the traffic, trash, and amount of Humvees weren't so … what they are today. Why is this, you ask? The answer is obvious. "Back in the day," we had personal accountability; we had diving boards. Millions of people would use them! A quarter of them would perish. This kept the number of us humans in a given area at a reasonable level. Over the years our diving boards were taken away, people discovered that they could get money for dying or being injured while jumping around and having fun – it was cheaper to remove diving boards than to pay amounts greater than what lives were worth. Bring back recklessness, drop overprotectiveness, and soon we'll all be living Downtown, smoking Lucky Strikes, and not looking both ways before we cross the street.
The key to our urban density issues is on last week's cover [June 1]. Forget that nobody you know can afford a condo Downtown; forget that nobody you want to know would buy into the suburban wasteland. If one looked closely at the cover of the Chronicle last week, one would see Deep Eddy Pool, and hovering above – a diving board! Look around town – I've only found two. Now I don't know what year that photo of Deep Eddy was taken, but I'm sure in those days the traffic, trash, and amount of Humvees weren't so … what they are today. Why is this, you ask? The answer is obvious. "Back in the day," we had personal accountability; we had diving boards. Millions of people would use them! A quarter of them would perish. This kept the number of us humans in a given area at a reasonable level. Over the years our diving boards were taken away, people discovered that they could get money for dying or being injured while jumping around and having fun – it was cheaper to remove diving boards than to pay amounts greater than what lives were worth. Bring back recklessness, drop overprotectiveness, and soon we'll all be living Downtown, smoking Lucky Strikes, and not looking both ways before we cross the street.
John Nordstrom