President's Perspective
"Freedom has its cost, but so does protection."
Those of us who were fortunate enough to be raised in this great country have gotten into the habit of taking our freedom, as well as our protection, for granted. Unfortunately, few of us ever give much thought to the fact that freedom and protection are usually on opposite sides of the balance beam.
If you stop to think about it, people who require a high degree of protection give up a lot of freedom in order to have that protection. How many celebrities have you heard make statements to the effect that they would give anything to be able to simply go shopping, or whatever, without being noticed? They have to give up a lot of freedom in order to gain an acceptable level of protection.
Sometimes it's someone close whose freedom is compromised in order for others to be protected. That's usually referred to as someone "doing 5 to 10." When we stop at a stop sign, we are conceding our freedom to drive right on through in order to protect ourselves and others.
As modelers, most of us are accustomed to giving up some freedom in order to protect ourselves as well as others. An example of this is when we put up a frequency control board. We give up the freedom to fly any time in order to provide some level of protection from interference.
There are many other areas where this tradeoff occurs, but one where few give it much thought is in the area of obtaining contest sanctions. We give up the freedom to run our contest on whatever date we want in order to get an area of protection from other contests running the same event(s) on the same date.
On the flip side, we give up that protection if we decide to exercise our freedom to restrict entry into that contest to members of a particular group.
We don't just sanction contests. We sanction a very large number of events which are not AMA Competition Regulations (rule book) competitions. The fact is that we sanction more non-rule-book events, both competitive and noncompetitive, than we do rule-book competitions. This has been the trend in the last decade or more.
The popularity of these non-rule-book events is, to a great degree, due to the ability of the organizers to exercise their freedom to use whatever rules, or for that matter virtually no rules, they decide upon. This has resulted in some terrific events—some local, some regional, and a few national. Some are competitive, while others are non-competitive fly-ins, and they create a fun, social atmosphere. Lacking common "rules" makes it difficult to compare these events and makes it difficult to determine what events would conflict.
Lately, there has been a lot of talk about providing an "area of protection" for these non-rule-book events. A protected drawing area would improve attendance at many of these events, but this is not all advantage; there are disadvantages as well.
Even if we were able to wave a magic wand and come up with a universally accepted method of determining what conflicts with what (I think a cure for all forms of cancer would be an easier task), there is still a problem few have considered: if some events are going to be protected, some others will have to give up their freedom to take place.
Of all of the people who have advocated the adoption of a "protected area" for these non-rule-book events, everyone has looked at it from the perspective of the organizers of the "protected" event, but few have expressed any thoughts about what happens if their event is the one that is refused a sanction due to a "conflict." Hmmm...
Freedom has its cost, but so does protection. Think about it.
Dave Brown AMA President dbrown@dbproducts.com
Transcribed from original scans by AI. Minor OCR errors may remain.
