In May of 2019 Canada’s Wonderland opened a new roller coaster. It’s called the Yukon Striker and it’s described as the ‘world’s tallest, fastest, and longest dive coaster’. You sit 8 across and at the top of the ride you are held in place looking over the edge waiting to do a 90-degree, 245 foot drop into an underwater tunnel, reaching a top speed of 130 km/hr. (There are a number of videos online if you are curious.) A friend and I rode it numerous times last summer. It was awesome! So much fun!
COVID-19 has been…something. It is hard to even begin to describe the impact it has had. And I think it is fair to say that we will be experiencing the effects for years to come. COVID-19 has fundamentally changed how we interact with each other. Among the things that are now a daily topic of conversation, safety is front and centre. It has always been an important topic, but it seems to have taken on new prominence. How many salutations do you see or hear that say, ‘be safe’ or something similar? Even on our roadways flashing signs encourage us to ‘be safe’ – and I assume they are referring to things beyond our driving habits.
I believe that safety is an important topic and there are many steps we can take to provide for a safer environment to live, work, and play in. Never the less there is a thread here that I think we should acknowledge and discuss. In a significant way safety, or at least feeling safe, can be very subjective. Consider the Yukon Striker. No matter how well engineered, no matter how many safety features are included, for those of you who do not like roller coasters you would not feel safe on it and would do just about anything else other than ride it. For those of us who do enjoy roller coasters…well I guess we just feel ‘safe enough’ to get on one.
My point is this. What makes you feel safe or unsafe might be very different than me; and navigating those differences can be a challenge. I think those conversations are worth having though, no matter how much they push us. A good place to start is to cut each other a little slack and try to be as gracious as possible in our interactions with those who experience safety differently than us. If someone genuinely doesn’t feel safe, then they don’t feel safe. Simply telling them they should – despite their feelings or experience – is not usually all that helpful. Taking the time to have a difficult conversation around what contributes to each of us experiencing a safer existence however just might.
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Roller Coasters, COVID, & Safety
In May of 2019 Canada’s Wonderland opened a new roller coaster. It’s called the Yukon Striker and it’s described as the ‘world’s tallest, fastest, and longest dive coaster’. You sit 8 across and at the top of the ride you are held in place looking over the edge waiting to do a 90-degree, 245 foot drop into an underwater tunnel, reaching a top speed of 130 km/hr. (There are a number of videos online if you are curious.) A friend and I rode it numerous times last summer. It was awesome! So much fun!
COVID-19 has been…something. It is hard to even begin to describe the impact it has had. And I think it is fair to say that we will be experiencing the effects for years to come. COVID-19 has fundamentally changed how we interact with each other. Among the things that are now a daily topic of conversation, safety is front and centre. It has always been an important topic, but it seems to have taken on new prominence. How many salutations do you see or hear that say, ‘be safe’ or something similar? Even on our roadways flashing signs encourage us to ‘be safe’ – and I assume they are referring to things beyond our driving habits.
I believe that safety is an important topic and there are many steps we can take to provide for a safer environment to live, work, and play in. Never the less there is a thread here that I think we should acknowledge and discuss. In a significant way safety, or at least feeling safe, can be very subjective. Consider the Yukon Striker. No matter how well engineered, no matter how many safety features are included, for those of you who do not like roller coasters you would not feel safe on it and would do just about anything else other than ride it. For those of us who do enjoy roller coasters…well I guess we just feel ‘safe enough’ to get on one.
My point is this. What makes you feel safe or unsafe might be very different than me; and navigating those differences can be a challenge. I think those conversations are worth having though, no matter how much they push us. A good place to start is to cut each other a little slack and try to be as gracious as possible in our interactions with those who experience safety differently than us. If someone genuinely doesn’t feel safe, then they don’t feel safe. Simply telling them they should – despite their feelings or experience – is not usually all that helpful. Taking the time to have a difficult conversation around what contributes to each of us experiencing a safer existence however just might.
This entry was posted on Thursday, October 8th, 2020 at 3:32 pm and is filed under Comments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.