Full-face and face/off!
View(s):Two things about faces drew my attention this week. The first was the spot of bother over full-face helmets, and how the local authorities might have got it wrong about road rules. The other was the brouhaha about the alpine air-crash, and how the international authorities desperately need to get it right as regards air-traffic regulations to do with screening and safety.
Full-Face
For one thing, this is not the first time that the police have changed their minds about motorcyclists and full-face helmets. In the good old days, there was no such thing as a full-face helmet. ‘Paradise’-type crash helmets with a simple strap (and a sun visor, if at all) were about all riders had; and if you wore one and had an accident, “tonight you would be in Paradise”.
Then came international safety standards, and business was quick to fasten on to it. A category-awareness-raising blitz followed. Full-face helmets soon became all the rage, in the face of a barrage of full-on advertising. Of course, they were costlier. But they were safer, more stylish, and made the greenest of schoolboy riders – be it still unlicensed or newly empowered – feel like Street Hawk.
After the advent of terrorism, the law-enforcement authorities began to frown on full-face helmets. Who knew whether the man behind that plastic, carbon-fibre, or Kevlar mask was a ‘terra’ or simply a terror-on-wheels? Only STF and the likes of ministerial or military outriders were afforded the privilege of riding with their visors shut.
In the aftermath of the end of the conflict, full-face helmets made a fashionable comeback. But not for long. Maybe because importers of the old face-off versions were feeling the pinch? Even as early as a few months after the war ended, the coppers cracked down on errant motorcyclists who flouted the ban – and the rule against full-face helmets was strictly enforced, especially during major international events such as CHOGM.
It eased off when that conference ended, and motorcyclists gladly returned to the full-face option for the umpteenth time. That honeymoon was not to last. A spate of daring daylight armed robberies soon put paid to the prospect and delight of owning and using a FFH. Now the reason being trotted out is that if FFHs are banned, robberies will cease. (Pigs might fly, do I hear you say? For certainly, the simple expedient of denying the law-abiding citizen his or her right to comfort and a sense of security won’t persuade the diehard hell’s angels from continuing to mount raids of banks and business establishments, will it! But there you have it – the law has its reasons of which reason itself might know nothing… except perhaps the business end of the motives of some unscrupulous helmet-import lobby…)
Face/Off
The second thing about faces to catch my eye was the spate of cartoons that came out after the Germanwings crash. The young co-pilot, 28-year-old Andreas Lubitz, deliberately plunged the aircraft into a French mountainside after a power dive of 38,000 feet over 8 minutes. From the Cockpit Voice Recorder evidence, it transpires that the crash was engineered. That man in the locked cockpit fully intended to commit suicide while making a statement. In the process, some 150 souls had no choice but to plummet out of the sky to their deaths – together with the airman who was later revealed to have undergone psychiatric counseling for depression.
On the one hand – as the cartoons and other commentary made it clear – airports and airlines appear to have missed the sky for the clouds when it comes to screening and safety measures. Just about everything from invasive full-body searches to unethical screening has been tried on passengers and cargo. But crew – and cockpit crew especially – seem to have been omitted from the full glare of requisite scrutiny. On the other – as German law, especially, and European codes of privacy, in particular, necessitate – the individual’s rights are often privileged over the common good. Of course, this sometimes means that a suicidal pilot may be protected by law until it is too late to preempt tragic disaster. Maybe rules and regulations will now be amended to strike a better balance between the rights of singular persons and the safety of passengers? Of airline’s responsibilities, little if anything has been said… so it seems that big business is passing the buck… again. (The ill-fated budget airline’s corporate parent has made all the placatory gestures and expressed puzzlement about how such a disaster could have occurred on their watch. The leader of the country in question has been outraged and dumbfounded in the same breath, for all the good it did.)
Full-Frontal Facedown
All this stuff about faces and masks off and screening for safety and security came to a head early this week. (And I don’t mean the mounted protest by motorcyclists protesting the full-face helmet ban – though it will be interesting to see how that pans out, and whether public antipathy can and will affect authority’s policy.) I mean the water-cannon treatment meted out to protesting university students – in which 1 bystander, 1 student, and 7 policemen were reported injured by the punitive action on the part of law-enforcement.
Now it is not the first time that university students have protested. Violently or otherwise, validly or not is a matter of perspective. Nor is it the first time that the powers that be have taken stern restrictive or retaliatory measures. Violent or other, validly or not is your point of view versus mine versus theirs. But it is the first time that a young national unity government avowedly intent on good governance, civics for the masses, and a return to the rule of law and order has cracked down so hard. It seems the facedown has shown the government with its full-face helmet off! And some aggrieved citizens somewhere are asking whether this isn’t somehow a subtle shade of daylight robbery: a just government acting just like all the other unjust governments before it?