Brain damage.

I know a few motorcyclists, and all of them love their bikes. All of them also wear helmets. It's the law, yes, but they've also been around long enough to see what happens to motorcyclists who don't wear helmets. Similarly, they wear leather or denim or even high-impact armored jackets to protect them from being mandolined when falling off the bike at speed. 

Then there's this guy.  

I hope Dad's Girlfriend will be all right if they fall off the back and he lands on top of her. 

If they want to take no precautions and defy the law, well, you do you -- it's still a free(ish) country. What really irked me here is that Dad's little boy was riding on a mini motorcycle ahead of them. Now, the boy was properly dressed in helmet and jacket, but it's illegal for kids to ride these e-motorbikes on the streets. You'd never see the tiny tot coming. 

Good thing they weren't on a two-way street with a hill, a hill on which oncoming traffic would not see a little kid in the middle of the road -- whoopsie, that's exactly where they were. 

There was no trouble this time, not that I saw, but the lesson to the kid is: A) If it worked once it will always work (because that's how boys think) and B) Dad is cool with Dad's Girlfriend and they drive a bike with no protection, so it must be what cool adults do. As they say, more is caught than taught. 

Now, I'm not a fan of safetyism; overprotection is clearly leading to neuroses in our younger generations. But these kinds of risks are just dumb. Some parents set their kids up to fail; others set them up to be braindead. 

Part of the problem is that we really don't take concussions seriously. A football player gets his bell rung, we say rub a little dirt on it. A detective gets knocked out cold before the commercial; by the time you're back from the bathroom he's rubbing his dead and asking the Chief if they got the number of the truck that hit him. For a look at the inhuman durability of TV characters, I recommend Mannix. Keith Roysdon on CrimeReads passed along the data from someone who watched all eight seasons of the slick 70's private eye show: 

A 2007 column in the Washington Post by Neely Tucker notes that someone had tallied the times that Mannix was shot or hit in the head during the 194 episodes of the series. Tucker wrote that Mannix was knocked unconscious 55 times and shot 17 times in the series.

I guess it goes without saying that Mannix was not realistic. 

I was editing a novel for a big-name publisher some time ago and one of the characters was knocked out by a blow to the head. After the chapter break one of the other characters said that at least there was no sign of concussion. I hated to tell them that losing consciousness is a TREMENDOUS sign of concussion.

Most guys have had plenty of moments in our lives where we know something is dangerous but we say "Oh well!" and just do it anyway. And that's not a bad thing. Courage is never to be underestimated. But demonstrating foolish behavior to a child is not a good idea. And if there'd been a cop sitting over the hill and Dad got arrested with Dad's Girlfriend for riding improperly and letting his son ride a kiddie motorcycle in the middle of the street, the story would not have been of hilarity or tragedy but humiliation (and Dad's Ex lording it over him for the rest of his life). 

Head impacts cause brain damage. There's no reason to act brain damaged ahead of time. 

(P.S.: One motorcyclist I know who had super maximum protective equipment? I know he raced around the highways like a lunatic, because I once rode across the county with him in his car and I thought we were all gonna die. He was stone-cold sober, too, the only time I thought a sober driver was going to kill me. So he was wise to at least armor up on his bike.)