My opinion is that no matter what society, group, race, class, religion you look at, you are going to have cool people who play by the rules and your going to have ***holes. I apply this as a general rule in my life. Take for example, there are cool cops and then there are real jerks, there are cool bikers and there are real jerks. Just think of any grouping of people and apply this, its true. Right now there is a classic example in the news. There have been hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops rotated in and out of their conflict in Iraq, but recently some bad ones did some bad things and that is what people remember. In Vietnam there was alot of good things done for the people by soldiers but everyone called them baby killers when they came back. So with off-roaders, people generalize just like everything else, and only remember the bad. All these are helped along by the media. Nobody wants to here about good stuff, just the bad.
The off-road community is 80% cool and there are those 20% who tarnish our image. Most large corporations, unions, religions politicians have whole teams of people who just do damage control. They have the money to cover up, silence, pay-offs, to keep their image clean. If you want to clean up the image you have to use the media to show club clean ups, family events, because all the people who no nothing about us just see the negatives and this is what they beleive we are like. Every year just before the May long there is the same 10yr old picture, of a big mud bog and trucks, used in the paper to show the Waiporous area, with a big write up about police and the craziness out there, after that you don't here anything about it untill next year, I can imagine that people think this is what it is like every weekend. We all know you can go out most times and hardly see anyone. You need the medias help to promote good images, and as far as peer pressure, well we have all fallen to this, but as you get older then you realize what is right and what is wrong. You need some way to keep unresponsible people from gaining access to areas, I would be willing to pay user fees to gain access, but people who don't really care, are just there for a good time, not along time might be turned off by that. I think once the damage is done it will take huge efforts to reverse them, in our case it could be too late.
Topic: Do you think the 4 wheel community has an image problem? (Read 10283 times)