Over the Hill and Behind the Wheel

You could almost feel sorry for the old guy on the TV screen, even though he had just plowed his 1992 Buick through nearly two blocks of a farmer's market in Santa Monica, killing ten people and injuring 45 others.

The pleasant, but bewildered, look on his face suggested that he might have been hard put to find his own keister with either or both hands, but those hands had just been on the steering wheel of the killer vehicle that left death, suffering and destruction in its wake.

Himself unharmed, he was unclear about what had happened, recalling only that he couldn't stop the car and might have hit the gas pedal instead of the brakes.

At the time, George Weller, 86, was carrying a valid California driver's license, as are many of his contemporaries and, even more remarkably, some of his elders; this group is challenged only by brand new teen-age drivers for Black Belt status in vehicular carnage.

The problem is not a simple one, and it contains imbedded seeds of human suffering beyond the obvious pain inflicted on accident victims.

The driving privilege (for that's what it is, after all) is synonymous with independence and freedom of movement, much desired by adolescents and fiercely defended in Geezerdom. Especially in the case of the latter bunch, among whom skateboards and ten-speeds are not viable substitutes for the automobile, there are times when it ranks just below oxygen in the hierarchy of basic human needs.

However, those who fail to see "advanced maturity" as an inexorable trudge toward the human junk heap is piddling against the wind of reality.

Although faculties fail at different rates and in different sequences among different people, time stealthily steals from all of us the vision, hearing, reflexes, spatial judgment, spryness and strength of our salad days - not to mention certain other drives of a non-automotive nature.

Given the proven potential of modern cars as weapons of mass destruction, it stands to reason that those with impaired or reduced ability to handle them should neither be licensed in the first place, nor be eligible for rubber-stamp renewal in perpetuity, as is the case in too many locales.

A woman in her nineties, for example, recently wrote an article deploring the fact that she had just re-upped as a Connecticut driver for an additional four years with nary a test of her vision, hearing, reflexes, or (presumably, though she didn't cite it) her ability to find her keister with either or both hands.

Elsewhere in this great land, she might have gotten the job done by mail, avoiding the need to even establish her ability to maintain an upright position.

Not surprisingly, advocates for human antiquity argue that elderly drivers are themselves the best judges of their motoring proficiency and point to studies such as one published by MIT indicating that "most" of them make responsible decisions as to when they should hang up their ignition keys.

Significantly, some 38 percent of the surveyed seniors who admitted that they were in poor health reported that they had "pretty much stopped driving."

Color me picky, if you wish, but I find "most" and "pretty much" to be poor substitutes for summarily cutting from the highway herd all oldsters unable to meet objective standards and pass objective tests after a certain age, at least every couple of years.

I'll leave that interval to the gurus of geriatria, but note the cautionary flag waved by Dan Foley, lead author of a study by the National Institute on Aging.

He wrote that Americans outlive their ability to drive by about six to ten years, leaving open a generous window of opportunity for replays of the Santa Monica tragedy.

Placing the decision about when to quit in the hands of those on the brink of mandatory pedestrian status flies in the face of our survival instincts. We're a nation wherein mobility has risen from the humble status of a luxury to an alchemic compound of birthright and death wish, allowing us to accelerate even as we deteriorate.

Ask us grayheads to decide when we should quit? Easier to convince a fall-down drunk to call a taxi. ("Oh, I'm oshay, Buddy, I can drive!")

Right now, only about 10% of American drivers are over 65, but in another generation, they will be one out of every five at the control of gawd-knows-what kind of guided missiles. Oh, and more than ten million of them will then be as old as or older than George Weller was when he changed forever the lives of his hapless victims.

What about me? Well, as regular readers know, I'm pushing 77, but I'm an excellent driver. Just call me "Old Rain Man."