One death every 13 minutes, the historical average in the U.S., is outrageous. Unfortunately, our society is not outraged. Instead, for the most part, we accept these tragedies as the cost we pay for the mobility we enjoy.And yet everybody's perfectly fine with over a trillion dollars and countless more lives wasted as a cost for 3,000 people dying on a single day almost a decade ago.
Of course the reason is that there's nothing sexy about the drip-drip-drip accumulation of traffic deaths; nobody's figured out how to work people up into a fever of fright over it so as to open up the national checkbook with no restraints. If politicians could turn traffic accidents into being able to spray billions of dollars into no-bid accounts for private contractors they would.
Remember a few years back when they'd raise the terror alert and then actually asked people to note "suspicious" things like parked vans? Of course they weren't asking to take a peep to see if the mirrors were installed in the right places or if the tires had enough air in them; they wanted you to think "wow, maybe there's a towelhead in the back of the van wrapped in explosives about to blow up America!" Meanwhile, the odds of somebody getting into the van and then plowing it into another car on the freeway are exponentially greater, but that seems to be perfectly fine with us. Hell, seems almost "American," don't it?
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