Some things are preventable, but we resist. Most of us use seatbelts, as required by law, and fewer people die in accidents as a result. Drunk driving went from a social convention to an affront against decency thanks to Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). Today, most people call an Uber. But I just read an essay wherein the author bragged she’d driven only a few miles rather to a friend’s home rather than fifty minutes to her own home while drunk. People smoke despite knowing throughout their entire lives that tobacco products are poisonous. Some insist they need guns for protection despite statistics proving gun ownership make our lives less safe. We take unnecessary risks that are life-threatening not just for ourselves but for others. Isn’t it time for a little healthy anger?

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Are you old enough to remember the expression, “one for the road.” Drunkenness was considered so very funny back in the day when I was a girl, and drunk drivers were rarely held accountable for the destruction they caused. Here’s my story:

My parents were at a party with work friends of my dad’s in 1963, expected home about nine in the evening. It was a work night, after all. I was ten or eleven years old, old enough to be left alone. By ten pm, I had assured my worried eight year old brother everything was fine and sent him back to bed. But I knew something was wrong, and I stayed up crazy-worried myself, listening for my parents’ car.

There was drinking at the party, but my parents were not heavy drinkers and sat at a kitchen table and drank coffee to sober up before the 30-minute drive home. After an hour, my dad said he still didn’t feel safe to drive. Mom thought she was okay, and ten minutes later she drove the family Morris Minor into a stone bridge. Both lived with only minor injuries. Mom broke her nose, and Daddy came home alone in a police car, wearing only his t-shirt covered in blood. (Both had gone through the windshield and Daddy cut open his forehead.) His first words before I even had the door fully open: “Your mother is okay.” I do not recall how he got back to the hospital to pick her up later in the night.

Our next car was a Volvo 122s, the only vehicle in the US available with shoulder harnesses at that time. Few cars even had seatbelts. My mother was afterward self-conscious about the little bump in her nose from the break.

It would be many years before my parents learned why after only one whiskey sour and hour of drinking coffee, Mom was not safe to drive. As a joke, someone had spiked their coffee with vodka.

Any sensible person would recognize the danger, but we do dangerous things, take unnecessary chances, and put people’s health and lives at risk anyway.

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Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, on Saturday, March 25, 1911, was the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of the city, and one of the deadliest in U.S. history. The fire caused the deaths of 146 garment workers—123 women and girls and 23 men—who died from the fire, smoke inhalation, or falling or jumping to their deaths. Most of the victims were recent Italian or Jewish immigrant women and girls aged 14 to 23; of the victims whose ages are known, the oldest victim was 43-year-old Providenza Panno, and the youngest were 14-year-olds Kate Leone and Rosaria "Sara" Maltese. —Wikipedia

Coffins lined the sidewalk as bodies were carried from the cooling building. Americans were outraged.

Attitudes toward preventable killers such as drunken driving, unrestrained auto passengers (seatbelts), smoking, second hand smoke, even the Vietnam war, can change in an instant. There were laws about factory safety at the time of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Those laws and newly enacted legislation protecting workers were enforced only after the deaths. Even then, there were those who considered restrictions unfair or an affront to liberty. wtf

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My elementary school practiced hiding under our desks as shelter from a nuclear bomb—a completely ineffective caution. When I was teaching we evacuated the school, though our route took longer to walk or even run than a tsunami would take to arrive. My grandchildren participate in live-shooter drills.

The only way to survive certain catastrophes is for them never to occur.

I would like to think that the murders of school children would be enough to rethink our absurd interpretation of the Second Amendment, which was intended to ensure that a new nation without a standing army would have enough trained citizens for an effective “well regulated militia.” The Founders could not have envisioned the availability of today’s military-style weapons. And certainly they would have questioned the need of placing such tools of war in the hands of youngsters living in communities with full-time professional police and firefighters, and in a nation with millions of full-time trained military personnel.

Gun related suicides take more lives than murders. People are more likely to be shot by their gun than to use it to defend themselves, more likely to be shot with the gun they thought would protect them. There are yearly statistics of toddlers who accidentally shoot family members and themselves.

The recent American love affair with personal ownership of weapons of war—I say recent because it was not like this when I was born—is an obscenity.

It is an indecency on a scale beyond human comprehension. Guns at the ready is not the way we are supposed to live. It is not the way we are supposed to die.

We all have better things to do.

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