Controversy and The Buddy System
With the increased popularity of solo diving as a possible alternative to the buddy system there has been a rising level of debate as to what really constitutes safe diving practise and how divers can best avoid the risks associated with their sport. Statistically speaking, scuba is a very safe activity, with incidents of injury far below most other "risk" sports such as football, horse riding or even tennis. Yet unlike these other sports, divers are in a hostile environment for which human beings are not adapted, breathing from what amounts to a life support system. Under these conditions fatality is always a possible outcome, even under the simplest of equipment or procedural problems. In dealing with this reality a number of major concerns about potentially inherent flaws or negative impacts that can exist within the buddy system have been voiced:
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Famous quotes containing the words controversy, buddy and/or system:
“And therefore, as when there is a controversy in an account, the parties must by their own accord, set up for right Reason, the Reason of some Arbitrator, or Judge, to whose sentence, they will both stand, or their controversy must either come to blows, or be undecided, for want of a right Reason constituted by Nature; so is it also in all debates of what kind soever.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)
“So, my sweetheart back home writes to me and wants to know what this gal in Bombay’s got that she hasn’t got. So I just write back to her and says, “Nothin’, honey. Only she’s got it here.””
—Alvah Bessie, Ranald MacDougall, and Lester Cole. Raoul Walsh. Sergeant Tracey, Objective Burma, to a buddy (1945)
“Fear, coercion, punishment, are the masculine remedies for moral weakness, but statistics show their failure for centuries. Why not change the system and try the education of the moral and intellectual faculties, cheerful surroundings, inspiring influences? Everything in our present system tends to lower the physical vitality, the self-respect, the moral tone, and to harden instead of reforming the criminal.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)