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:
“Ours was a highly activist administration, with a lot of controversy involved ... but I’m not sure that it would be inconsistent with my own political nature to do it differently if I had it to do all over again.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“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)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)