Drugs

Booze

Speed

Teens

Jerks

Macho Men

Bikers

Other Fools

These substances and people types -- in various combinations -- kill
44,000 of U.S. citizens a year.  It's been like this for decades.  But
nothing substantive is ever done to reduce this carnage.  Because
nobody cares.

Are YOU part of the problem?

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"A Deadly Story We Keep Missing"

By Peter J. Woolley
The Washington Post
Wednesday, December 27, 2006; A19

The non-story of 2006 was also the non-story of 2005. It is a non-story
every year going back decades. Yet the number of people who die in car
crashes in the United States is staggering, even if it is absent from
the agenda of most public officials and largely ignored by the public.

When all is said and done and the ball begins to drop on New Year's
Eve, 44,000 people, give or take several hundred, will have died in
auto accidents this year. To put that number in perspective, consider
that:

o  At the 2006 casualty rate of 800 soldiers per year, the United
States would have to be in Iraq for more than 50 years to equal just
one year of automobile deaths back home.

o  In any five-year period, the total number of traffic deaths in the
United States equals or exceeds the number of people who died in the
horrific South Asian tsunami in December 2004. U.S. traffic deaths
amount to the equivalent of two tsunamis every 10 years.

o  According to the National Safety Council, your chance of dying in an
automobile crash is one in 84 over your lifetime. But your chances of
winning the Mega Millions lottery are just one in 175 million.

o  If you laid out side by side 8-by-10 photos of all those killed in
crashes this year, the pictures would stretch more than five miles.

o  If you made a yearbook containing the photos of those killed this
year, putting 12 photos on each page, it would have 3,500 pages. If you
wanted to limit your traffic-death yearbook to a manageable 400 pages,
you'd either have to squeeze more than 100 photos onto each page or
issue an eight-volume set.

Can you hear me now? Automobile deaths are the leading cause of death
for children, for teenagers and in fact for all people from age 3 to
33. Yet this annual tragedy is not a cause celebre.

Opinion leaders largely ignore the ubiquitous massacre. No marches,
walkathons, commemorative stamps or fundraising drives are organized.
It is not brought up in the State of the Union address. It is rarely
the subject of public affairs shows. Statistics aren't updated daily in
major newspapers or broadcasts.

Gruesome crashes are reported just one at a time, each as if it might
never happen again. Little attention is paid to the aftermath: safety
measures taken or not taken, the workings or non-workings of the
justice system. These avoidable deaths, as well as more than 2 million
nonfatal dismemberments, disfigurements and other injuries that go
along with them, have become part of the fabric of everyday life in the
United States.

Elected officeholders naturally take the path of least resistance. They
are well aware that significantly reducing deaths on the roads requires
radical solutions in the form of regulation, investment and
enforcement. Roads need to be made safer, for example, by extending
guardrails and medians to every mile of busy highways. Speeding and
aggressive driving need to be much more rigorously controlled. Trucks
need to be separated from automobiles wherever possible. And cars need
to be built slower and stronger.

But every solution is readily opposed by someone: manufacturers,
industrial unions, truckers, consumers, taxpayers -- though all are
potential victims themselves. The public is not to blame. It is hemmed
in on every side by mind-numbing advertising and shouted stories of the
moment. Apparently no medium is willing to bludgeon people -- as they
need to be -- with statistics and trends on the dangers facing them
every time they set out in their automobiles.

Only if there is a public outcry will this situation get the attention
due it. Only when people fully realize the absurd and avoidable costs
of the dangers that stalk them on the road -- and then demand
governmental action in the form of forceful intervention and strict
regulation -- will this become the story of the year, as it should be.

The writer is a professor of political science at Fairleigh Dickinson
University and executive director of PublicMind, a public opinion
research group there.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/26/AR2006122600775.html

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