Forty Thousand

I suppose I'm fascinated by airport security because it garners a totally disproportionate volume of our national resources for the benefit it provides.

Following any given shoe bomber, underwear bomber, prosthetic leg bomber, or wheelchair bomber we go on red alert. Red Alert! This is acceptable, yes...to a degree. The thing is, we give so much attention, time and money to downed airliners, to determining cause, to providing for security, but for what? Several dozen lives annually?

We accept the madness of airport security and we will accept even more madness going forward, yet the very same people willing to get strip searched and probed in the nether area are the ones routinely voting down any measures to slow traffic, to allow the installation of more red-light cameras, to building correct roads, to provide for stricter cell phone laws -- the things that would cost much, much less to implement yet would save thousands more lives than a coupla crashed airplanes.

We accept airport security to preserve our way of life, the way of life supposedly threatened by airline terrorists. We accept the curtailment of these civil liberties yet can't put on a fucking seat belt in a car or a helmet while on a motorcycle.

More than 320,000 people have died on roads since 9/11. This is apparently an acceptable trade off against the, say, 732 that might have died at the hands of terrorists had we not done a damn thing different since. How many lives might have been saved had we not pulled traffic officers off the streets and into counterterrorism.

Nonetheless, this is why I blog and have such fun with it because we voluntarily kill off 40,000 of us each year. This really is [mostly] voluntary in my opinion. Allow me to become Pat Robertson for a moment:

• These 40,000 deaths are deserved because of gay marriage;
• These 40,000 deaths are because this nation has lost Jesus;
• These 40,000 deaths come because of America's pact with the devil;
• These 40,000 deaths are because we voted God out of our country;
• These 40,000 deaths are because we failed to assassinate Chavez;

Truthfully, you might as well believe this. Might as well, because we fail to give the annual road death toll the proportionate level of concern as we do airline terrorism.