Mired as I am in my traditional Christian theism, I don't think that Easter egg hunts best represent the purpose of the holiday. On the other hand, there's nothing wrong with them, kids have fun and I have a lot of fond memories of dyeing eggs with my parents and sister when I was a kid, and then the two of us hunting them after Mom and Dad hid them.
Little did we know how dangerous it was. Thankfully, our friends at the University of California at Berkeley -- or at least their lawyers -- have shown us the way. Families of university employees were invited to an Easter egg hunt on campus last Sunday. They lined up, some for as long as a half an hour, in order to hand a waiver form to a university employee and then the child in question was released to pick up his or her allotted five eggs that had been placed on the flat grass field in plain sight.
By signing, the parents acknowledged that this particular activity at the 25th Annual Easter Egg Hunt and Learning Festival carried risks, which ranged from minor injuries such as scratches to "catastrophic injuries including paralysis and death."
So now we have learned that the best way to measure the success of an Easter egg hunt is by the number of catastrophic casualties or fatalities it produces, or, we hope, fails to produce. Good to know.
They were gonna make us make up waivers for students going on field labs to sign. Where we have to come up with every "likely and unlikely" threat.
ReplyDeleteLikely threats: bees, fire ants, mud, tripping over rocks or logs, stepping in a hole
But....then someone brought up "But what if a meteorite fell out of the sky? Do we have to include that? Or what if a black bear happened to show up? Or a mountain lion?"
The campus lawyers kind of coughed and decided maybe waivers weren't such a great idea after all. (All our students are adults, most of them have jobs or hobbies - some are LEOs, some are EMTs, many of them hunt - that are more dangerous than our labs).
That Easter egg hunt sounds depressing. The one we do at church is more like "All the church ladies bring a boatload of candy filled eggs, we toss 'em out in the grassy courtyard area, it's a free for all where the six or eight little kids grab as many eggs as they possibly can...and usually wind up with more than their basket will hold." No one has died in the nearly 20 years I have helped out with these.
The silliness inspired by lawyers knows no end.
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