The Jaws Of Life

My monologues are always hinged on energy -- the way we use it, the way we get it, the way we pay for it. I directly discuss the social consequences of living in a country where the way we use energy is wantonly wasteful, the way we get it is through the prosecution of wars and environmental degradation, and the way we pay for it is through a debt based consumer economy, hallucinated wealth and traffic fatalities. Mostly, I thoroughly enjoy blogging about how wretched we go about this.

Tonight, however, I don't really enjoy it. We learned of a niece (to be clear, the niece of my sister-in-law) who was involved in a car wreck in Roseville last night. She was already a paraplegic, having lost the use of her legs ten years ago in a traffic accident, paralyzed from the waist down. She was being driven by a boyfriend who crashed into the back of a parked car, and she, not wearing her seatbelt, broke both femurs and is suffering from internal bleeding.

She was not wearing a seatbelt and was extracted with the jaws of life. He was booked into Placer county under suspicion of DUI. He escaped injury save for a cut lip.


We are so damn eager to develop a homeland security department, to keep 140,000 soldiers in Iraq, deploy thousands more to Afghanistan, and to spend over two trillion dollars ($2,000,000,000,000) to save, perhaps, 5,000 more lives from dying at the hands of terrorists, yet we routinely accept that the way we move involves risks and those risks (see above) are acceptable.

If this is how we are gonna spend our money, well, OK. It is wholly misguided in my opinion, but then, my opinion matters little. I will never be in a position to allocate such things and I never will. Truthfully, if all of you choose to believe you are better drivers than most, that you are less likely than the average driver to be involved in a crash, that you drive an SUV because it feels safer yet you drive it in more dangerous ways, and that you tailgate me because you have blind faith that I will never have any reason to suddenly stop, well, you're only doing what every other American is doing. Go ahead, tell your children that our dead soldiers are now in heaven guarding the angels from Islamic terrorists, and that mom and dad willingly and gleefully shoveled out thousands of their their hard earned children's dollars in wars on terror, blowing up suspicious packages left at bus stops and shutting down airport terminals for a good-bye kiss, while passively accepting that as many neighbors die each month by drunk drivers and other assholes as have ever been killed by terror.

This car crash, injuring this girl -- the victim is out of sight. Her injury is dispersed in time and space, without regard to all other injuries that came before hers. There is no regular accumulator, like the number of dead US soldiers in Iraq, no number to tally all those injured. There are no vigils, no pledges for "support our injured" like we "support our troops." We just assume it can happen to anyone and drive on.