HINKAMP COLUMN: Cell phones cause brain damage

Let’s make a deal. I won’t drive drunk, you won’t drive and talk on your cell phone. I won’t eat Kung Po chicken with chop sticks while I drive, you won’t drive and talk on your cell phone. I won’t practice my one-legged yoga poses while I drive, you don’t talk on your cell phone. Together we can save lives and the insurance companies billions of dollars. Take your cell phone and stick it where the sun don’t shine – your glove compartment. It’s not like I don’t love gadgets. I have an unhealthy, verging on unholy, relationship with my computer and have my eyes on a GPS locator for my birthday. However, the telephone has actually changed little since the day when in 1876 Alexander Graham Bell first said, “Watson come here.” The second call had something to do with free copies of the Gideons Bible. The phone and the conversations we have on it are just as banal as ever, the device itself is just more portable now. I will always think of the phone as an instrument of torture — telemarketers, insurance salesmen, telemarketers, religious zealots, the boss calling you at home and telemarketers. So now you get to carry that bliss-producing instrument around with you all the time? Oh wow. There are quite a few studies coming out now that rank the risk of talking on a phone while driving close to that of driving while intoxicated. Even if you do not read or believe such studies, simple observation should bring you to the conclusion that cell phones impair judgment. Just look at the people who use them. They talk louder, look stupider and run into inanimate objects while they are narrating their lives. “Bob? Yeah it is so cool I’m walking down the street and talking to you at the same time. Wow, is technology great or what? I have to hang up now, but I’ll get back to once I get in my car and the traffic get heavy.” The other studies are also true, cell phones do cause brain damage. People who would normally be cautious drivers and would be willing to send anyone with a .00000001 percent blood alcohol level to a life in Shawshank without redemption, think nothing of blathering to their 8-year-old while they are whizzing through traffic, shifting into four wheel drive, while changing lanes in a snowstorm. I’m one of those people who turns down the radio when the traffic starts getting thick. What is it that can’t wait? Are you trading stocks? Running a suicide hotline out of your car? Raising funds for George Bush, Jr.? When you come up with a truly Mother Teresa-like reason for talking on your cell phone while you drive let me know. Just don’t call me.

Dennis Hinkamp’s column appears every Wednesday in the Statesman. Comments may be e-mailed to DHinkamp@msn.com.