If I ever go in.

[KBUDA 19]

Over the past few months, I've noticed an increasing level of bickering on the incident forums over circumstances mostly unrelated to the fatality. I get that since this was an election year, people wanted to express their frustrations with the USPA. However, in many cases these incident forums will be the most complete aggregate of 1st and 2nd hand information, as well as a place with links to official reports (when they exist) and fundraising pages. These people will have obituaries in their hometown newspapers, and their families will know what happened, but that Incident forum will be the way that their story gets told to the skydiving world years after they die.

We have the Base Fatality List as a memorial to those whose luck ran out, and as a resource to help us learn from our past. I'm not saying that we need to treat the Incident forum with the same degree of respect as the BFL. What I am saying is that if I ever go in, and there is any sort of an afterlife, and I catch any of you grumpy old nutjob skydivers talking on my incident page about how the USPA could have regulated me back down to the planet better, I will do my best to haunt you.

I don't care about the USPA. I pay my dues as a yearly fee to skydive. I care about the people around me, and I care about knowing who to trust and who to be wary of. I trust my pilot, I trust my DZOs to make the right call if circumstances aren't clearly in the jumpers' favor, and above all I trust myself to walk away from situations that I cannot make myself comfortable with.

If I ever go in, and you feel the need to be a curmudgeon, go outside and tell it to the squirrels or something, cause I don't care. If there's something to be learned from it, please post it. Even if I made a mistake and it makes me look like an idiot, give me the respect of believing I'm able to show others how they can be less of an idiot. But, if you're just getting on your soap box and ranting like a lunatic like I'm doing now, then this is the forum for it. Don't piss on my grave stone.