July 30, 2007
Life in these times is dangerous. Perhaps we don't see it every day, but even life in the comfort of the developed world has its dangers too.
For example, if the statistics aren't lying, I recently read in USA Today that about 42,000 people died in car wrecks in 2006. Something like ten times as many people died in the course of normal travel in our nation in a single year than have died in Iraq in several years.
Dream Sequence
Somewhere in America, virulent protestors are running around protesting the Interstate highway system, occasionally chanting, "Eisenhower lied! Who died?"
RANKING SEN. OF SOMETHING OR OTHER: The President lied when he sent our people onto the American highways! We need to pull out from the roads of our nation at once.
SEN. OF SOMETHING ELSE: The National Transit Safety Bureau is not meeting its schedules for reducing deaths on American roads. We need to send them a message by threatening to pull out all of our drivers, that message being: we don't care enough to stick around and see what you guys do next.
JUN. SEN. OF A STATE: I think it's outrageous that our drivers are being sent onto the roads full of potholes. I don't care enough to get into the details of why that's the case, nor the very real problems facing the efforts to repave the roads. In fact, I don't even care that I only know about this problem because civil engineers identified the problem, wrote a report about it, and started to fix it, long before my aides and I even imagined such a problem could exist. I do care that I get a good TV spot showing me being 'concerned about the drivers.'
SEN. OF THE PRESIDENT'S PARTY: I am afraid that I can no longer support this war, because I'm concerned about the swing voters in my state- er, ahem, the situation on the ground has changed.
YET ANOTHER SEN.: These were the wrong roads, at the wrong time, in the wrong way.
That's just a dream sequence, but I think you get my point here.