My own response, as well as those of others, to the events of September 11th taught me that major crises tend to entrench people more in their beliefs as opposed to altering them. The tragedy in Parkland, Florida does nothing to change my view that significant enough gun control to alter the culture of mass violence in America, i.e. the confiscation of millions of weapons, would cause civil unrest and domestic insurgency, if not civil war. I don’t believe that guns in the hands of my neighbors protect my civil liberties, but they do, and the overlap of that belief with a paranoid apocalyptic worldview makes much of the United States a powder keg.
My thoughts congealed around an interesting juxtaposition of stories on the horrible impact of the flu this year on children, and the stories of the massacre at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and I wondered if more kids in Broward County would die this year in car crashes, or if more high school students in Florida would die while driving to school this year than died on February 14th? 84 children have died of the flu since October, but more than three times as many have died on the roads just in the new year. I read a piece with this emphatic headline:
Are you asking how you can tell your son it’s safe to drive him to soccer practice?
Sure, let’s get more kids vaccinated with better vaccines, go ahead and tweak our gun laws to diminish the horrible loss of life in these mass shootings, but if you really want to save thousands upon thousands upon thousands of children’s lives (not to mention millions from serious injury) #slowthecars and fight for schools in walkable neighborhoods and build communities where children can live active and engaged lives without getting into cars or walking and biking next to enormous transportation projectiles. We can do it. It’s been done.
Prioritize people, subjugate the car.
(What was that I said about civil war?)
Fatalities from auto accidents in the U.S. average between 30K and 40K per year – depending on which statistics you prefer. Numbers in this range have persisted for decades and these deaths have become a normal accepted fact of life. The benefits of driving are immediate and obvious while the pain of random deaths at some indeterminate point in the future that will likely affect strangers far away are easy to ignore.
Mass shootings have also become a normal fact of life. Remember how shocking the Columbine, Colorado school shooting was back in 1999? How many people even remember the University of Texas shooting in Austin back in 1966 anymore? This is something we’ve adjusted to because changing any of the individual parts of a complex puzzle isn’t something society is good at. We experience complacency punctuated by fear and panic. Back to complacency. Rinse. Repeat. These aren’t problems we’re likely to resolve any time soon.
I’m not sure if any of the hand wringing and chatter ever moves beyond gossip and schadenfreude.
Except here, and elsewhere too I’m sure pockets of a pedestrian culture are reviving in places real people can live. You can be working class, middle class, or poor and walk and use transit to get around here. Slowing the cars is happening, two way streets being restored, narrowing lanes, etc.
My zeal is more a continued call to “the chosen” who hear the message! 😉
I’m trying to be John the Baptist, Morpheus, the Gnostic Revealer…let me have my fun!!!
Almost laughing out loud…smiling broadly!
My point is that people respond to immediate incentives and proximate pain. So long as day-to-day life still works no one has much interest in changing anything. When a crisis hits lots of action endues – very little of it productive or rational. As soon as the crisis is over everyone goes back to sleep. For the folks who are paying attention (and who are both correct in their weird assumptions and also lucky to be in the right place at the right time) this herding behavior of the larger population can be a benefit. Get ahead of the curve. Position yourself to be in the better place for what the future might bring. Have the things on hand that people will be needing at the next inflection point. And cover your ass.