Diving Board Disappearances

When I was 12 years old, my family lived on the eastern side of lower Michigan, around the base of the thumb if you are imitating the shape of the state with the inside of your right hand. That summer we visited Holland, Michigan on the western side of the state, by the shores of Lake Michigan (just below the base of your pinkie).

Now, I’m not really sure why the Great Lakes are officially “lakes” and not given their more proper designation as giant inland “seas.” When I think of a lake, I think of a body of water small enough that I can see the opposite shore. That’s definitely not the case with the Great Lakes, especially the behemoths known as Lake Huron, Superior and Michigan. From the shore, they look like oceans, complete with waves, sand and seagulls. Maybe they are not called seas because they are filled with fresh water as opposed to salt water. But I digress…

The motel diving board, once a staple of tourist towns everywhere, is now on the Endangered Species List.

Anyway, Holland, Michigan is a tourist town settled in the 18th and 19th centuries by bona fide Dutch people from Holland, Europe. As such, they brought to Michigan many of their traditions such as great cheese and chocolate, vast fields of colorful tulips, windmills, wooden clogs, and the thick-banged blonde haircut made famous by the kid on the Dutch Boy paint cans.

In Holland, my family stayed at a giant old resort of a motel, the kind you would be more likely to find in the Catskills or Miami Beach. It had hundreds of old white wooden beach chairs surrounding the largest outdoor swimming pool I’ve ever seen at a motel. And at the deep end of the pool were two Olympic-quality diving boards.

The lower diving board was strong and springy with plenty of lift for attempting a clean one-and-a-half dive with little or no splash. Not enough spring in the diving board and you end up with a one-and-a-quarter dive, the kind that leaves you hitting the water with your face and belly. It’s not a fatal injury for a 12-year-old, but one that can leave you red for the rest of the day, especially if some of the poolside witnesses to this diving mishap are cute teenage girls.

The high dive at this particular pool was something else altogether. It was more of a diving platform than an actual board and I am not exaggerating (well, maybe a little) when I say that it was what they call in the Olympics a ten-meter high platform. For you metrically challenged individuals out there, that translates into a stunning 33 feet of pure air above the surface of the water. In retrospect, it might not have been 33 feet high, but it was easily the highest diving board I’d ever been on, forcing me to weigh the embarrassment of climbing back down the ladder versus the pain of a possible back-flop on the surface of the pool. Any diver who has achieved the perfect back-flop will tell you that it is about seven times more painful than a belly flop, but once again I digress…

During the 1980s, some organization went around to just about every motel swimming pool in America and removed the diving boards. I don’t know if it was insurance adjusters or Mothers Against Daredevil Diving (MADD) who did the dirty work, but one day we woke up in our motel beds to find that the diving boards were gone and someone had painted “no diving” on the list of pool rules right below the vaguely-worded-but-I-know-it-if-I-see-it “no horseplay.”

For me, the removal of motel diving boards was the start of something sinister in this country. It was the moment when we forgot Franklin D. Roosevelt’s immortal words, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” and began fearing just about everything.

Maybe it was because the Baby Boomers started having teenagers of their own that we as a nation turned into such hand-wringing ninnies. Playground equipment is now as safe as a padded room in a mental asylum. No aspirin shall be sold unless it is triple-wrapped with tamper proof plastic. And Halloween has pretty much been turned into a sterile event where kids meet their classmates at the mall for overly organized games and triple-wrapped sugar-free sweets with NO PEANUTS!

Six years ago grown men and women bought gas-powered generators and stocked up on bottled water and canned vegetables because someone convinced them that the Y2K threat was going to disable every computer in the land. When that didn’t transpire, these worry warts didn’t even shrug. They just moved on to the next big fear on their schedule.

Five years ago we did have a real tragedy when terrorists used our own airlines to firebomb the World Trade Centers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington. I think we learned a valuable lesson that day about who our real enemies are and about how to ensure that that sort of thing doesn’t happen again.

But I’ve got to tell you, if I hear one more politician say, “Everything changed on 9/11,” I’m going to scream. If you honestly believe that our country had to change its laws and moral compass because we were attacked, then you, my friend, have surrendered to terrorism, not me.

Fear of terrorism has led us to turn our backs on some of the most basic of American tenets. For example, the United States government finally relented to the wishes of our only strong ally in the War in Iraq recently when we released three British citizens after holding them in Guantanamo Bay for two-and-a-half years without charging them with a single crime. The three Britons, all of Pakistani descent, claim they were in Pakistan for a wedding of a cousin when they decided to travel to neighboring Afghanistan. There they were rounded up by US forces and shipped to the other side of the world to Guantanamo where they claim they were routinely tortured both physically and mentally.

Since their release, the three British Muslims have made a movie about their experiences called The Road to Guantanamo. Directed by Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross, the film is rated R and recently won the Silver Bear Award at the Berlin Film Festival.

Just don’t expect to see it anytime soon in American theaters or on American television. Big Brother worries that seeing it would just make you more afraid than you already are.