The scooter and the back seat

A family in Yanbu spends a whole evening arguing about the electric scooter the eldest grandson wants. Too fast, says his grandmother. Too new. Nobody knows what those batteries do. He will fall.

The argument is long and serious, and everyone joins in. Then the evening ends, and the same family drives home with three small children loose in the back seat, one of them standing between the front seats to see the road.

Nobody mentions it. It is how the family has always driven.

This is the usual shape of worry. Anything new arrives carrying a question mark, and we question it hard. Anything old was waved through long ago, by people who are no longer checking. Its risks are not smaller. They are simply invisible, because they are familiar.

Imagine the back seat as a fresh invention, proposed at that dinner table for the first time. A metal box travelling fast on the highway, small children unrestrained inside it, nothing to hold them if it stops suddenly. Nobody in the room would agree to it.

None of this means the scooter is safe, or that the family should panic about the car. It means the scrutiny points in one direction only. The new thing has to prove itself. The old thing is presumed innocent because it arrived first.

A few years from now, some of what we all do without thinking will look careless, even reckless, to the people who come after us. We do not yet know which parts. That alone is a reason to stop giving the familiar a free pass.