I hate it when states use their death statistics to push a little message on their billboards:
OVER 200 KIILLED THIS YEAR… so: …Buckle up! … Don’t Drink & Drive! … Obey the Speed Limit!
Supporting the lie that safety is possible with cars.
Relevance? I imagine people are just buying a different car instead of a bicycle.
Or you can view it as living in a system which may, and often does, compel all of us to eventually visit potentially deadly violence on someone else.”
I was just Watching Dead to me, which is a show about good people doing horrible things, and two of the three seasons settle on accidentally killing someone with a car.
That is to say the question “how do we have a character remain sympathetic after they’ve killed someone?” is “easy! we’ll put them behind the wheel!”
Just as the question,“How do we make this bank-robbing villain sympathetic?” is answered by “make them have to pay for their child’s treatable illness.”
We could build a better society just around making writers’ jobs more difficult.
If only we had done anything to prevent this instead of doing everything to make it inevitable.
It is kind of comical how every airplane accident is thoroughly investigated and systemic changes immediately proposed and implemented, while mothers of dead children have to petition for a stop sign. And I don’t mean airliners, I mean people in their little 2-4 seater Cessnas who took off when it was clear and couldn’t find the runway when the weather changed.
Then I remember that everyone in those little planes are really rich and it all makes sense.
The sign warning us about traffic deaths is the improvement, in their eyes.
I’m not saying things can’t get better, but they don’t get better from people making better individual choices, which is what that sign clearly implies.
But I am also saying things can’t get THAT much better without giving people options to get out of cars without getting killed by cars.