Why Don't Politicians Talk About Car Crashes?!?!

I have always wondered why Joe Biden has not brought road safety up as a platform. I found this article very interesting, it's a Q&A with Dr. Cynthia Wachtell on car crashes and U.S. presidents.

(Photo from SmartPlanet)

If Ryan and Brad are busy we could also use a politician, doesn't need to be sexy, though I've heard politicians tend to like sex, we will use anyone.

Here is a part of it:

Can you imagine if we did not pursue effective measures to prevent heart disease or breast cancer or prostate cancer? People would be up in arms about it.

There’s a man named Leonard Evans who is a former safety researcher for General Motors. And he a book called Traffic Safety. He wrote that the countries with the best traffic records acknowledge crashes as a major “public health problem” requiring urgent attention to a much greater extent than occurs in the U.S.

And that’s just it. We just had an entire presidential contest in which the word traffic accident never came up, except during the vice presidential debate when Joe Biden felt obliged in response to something Paul Ryan was saying about a family which had been personally affected by car accidents.

Joe Biden responded by discussing his own tragic experience. But no one built upon it. No one asked any of the candidates what are you going to do to make our roads safer.

Why You Should Care About Distracted Driving Month

Today I had my kids color in free, printable pages I downloaded from AT&T's site.

They read "No Text On Board"

I taped them into the inside of my car.

Hoping someone will see and think twice. You are probably thinking, yeah right lady. Before you leave this page, hear me out.

Car crashes are the leading cause of death to people under the age of 12.

A lot of fatal car crashes are avoidable. That is what drives me mad. But that fact drives me. And it is a fact.

Adults are now texting and driving more then teenagers. What a pathetic statistic.

Look around you when you are at stop signs. People have their heads down, looking at their phones. They are probably talking or texting to people they like or perhaps love. They risk not only their own life but yours and others as well.

April is Distracted Awareness Month.

You should care.

Around 110 Americans die in car crashes every single day. And what pisses me off is that a lot of these crashes don't need to happen. They are not accidents. When you are given a diagnosis of cancer the majority seek treatment. Why are we Americans driving around pretending that "accidents" just happen and there's nothing to do to avoid them but buy a safer car? That's the big fat lie we are living by. When we are sick we take care of ourselves. We need to take care of ourselves by driving safely.

I'm talking to as many people as I can now about the dangers of texting, talking and using hands free while driving. It is not safe. Please help us spread the word.

I had printed out on the table a page that had information about a little 9 year-old girl who was run over by someone texting and driving. My 6 1/2 year-old asked who she was. I hesitated and then said, she was a little girl who got run over by and adult texting and driving and she died.

My son was quiet.

A few minutes later I heard him ask my nanny, "Where is this little girl?" My awesome nanny explained that the girl went before her time.

We talk to our kids about danger. The dangers of pools, guns, strangers. We need to talk to them about the danger of cars. But we need to stop being the danger.

We have to start driving with more care for one another.

Because who wants to die in a freaking car crash? Speeding and zipping through lanes just to get somewhere 10 minutes before others is senseless. Especially if you never get there.

There is so much that can be done so I hope you can do something in honor of Distracted Driving month for all of the people who have died in car crashes.

And in the last 10 years alone that number is over 1/2 million, in America alone.

Where are the ribbons for that cause?

This Young Woman Speaks Up When Friends Text While Driving

Do you speak up when you are a passenger in the car and the driver begins to text or talk on their phone?

You should.

Even if the person mocks you.

Read and hear about Cady Reynolds, a 16 year-old who was killed by a fellow distracted texting, teen who ran a red light, while texting.

"Distracted driving kills. Safe driving starts with you," says the sister of Cady Reynolds.

On May 30, 2007, 16-year-old Cady Reynolds was driving her best friend home from a movie near Omaha, NE when another teen driver--who was texting behind the wheel--ran a red light and slammed into her car at 50MPH. Cady was rushed to the hospital with critical injuries and died the next day. (Distraction.Gov)

Are you a teen? Do you ask drivers to stop texting and talking while driving? Are you an adult who feels comfortable, doesn't feel comfortable? I'd love to hear.

Media &The Flu vs. Media & Car Crashes

So much attention on this flu outbreak. While I too take precaution and worry about it I believe we need to give equal attention, if not more to car crashes. They are the number one cause of death for our children.

"...says Dr. Etienne Krug, the director of the Department of Injuries and Violence Prevention at WHO.

Krug says that when it comes to the health and survival of children around the globe, there has been a preoccupation with infectious diseases and malnutrition. But he notes that a child who survives infancy faces a series of dangers as they get older.

"Once a child reaches age 9, injuries become the leading cause of death," Krug says. "We have a huge public health problem out there. ... It is like wiping out the entire child and adolescent population of Chicago every year."

The World Health Organization found that being on the road or in a car is dangerous for children anywhere in the world"

-via NPR

Car crashes kill 260,000 children a year and injure about 10 million.

Why do we continue to focus on that which we can not control? In my mind it is as if we have taken this fatalistic approach to deaths via car crashes, attributing them to gods on a mountain top. Yet, when we are sick or our children are sick we use hand sanitzer, we get shots, we avoid public spaces.

Kids are dying at the hands of adults daily. Many of these crashes being preventable. Yet prevention, merely by driving as safely as possible, is not being taken.

Again, why?

This Person Checked Email While Driving

A good article from NPR on the distracted driving hell we are now putting ourselves in. The author admits to checking email while driving.

Look around you at stop signs and look at everyone looking down. You know what they are doing. I mean certainly they all aren't getting road, OK I won't get ahead of myself there.

The author mentions some ideas. As my great friend who emailed me this story this morning said, keeping the dialogue going is important.

A Guest Post by Act Out Loud's Julie Kettner

I connected with Act Out Loud's Julie Kettner via Twitter. She is Act Out Loud's National Campaign Manager. This is a guest post by her. Car crashes are the no. 1 cause of death and injuries for teens in the United States. We want to change those statistics and we know the best people to do it – teens themselves!

Act Out Loud is a teen-led contest held each May as part of Global Youth Traffic Safety Month hosted by National Organizations for Youth Safety® (NOYS) and funded by The Allstate Foundation. At NOYS, we know that peer-to-peer interaction creates change, so we ask teens to ACT OUT LOUD to take back the streets for safety. Over 300 high schools across the country participate in Act Out Loud and we want more teens involved in this movement to spread traffic safety messages through fun projects while earning great prizes!

This year high school Act Out Loud teams will plan a school rally to take place in May as part of Global Youth Traffic Safety Month. As they plan this rally, there are fun projects along the way to help their team earn up to $1,000, and qualify for the grand prize of $10,000! The projects are simple and can be done in a number of ways. In addition to the $1,000, teams also receive a FREE toolkit full of resources like pens, pencils, buttons, wristbands, thumb bands, posters, postcards, and much more to use at their rallies.

We have many other opportunities for youth to be involved and win prizes. Check out www.ActOutLoud.org for all the contest details and www.NOYS.org for more information about us.

Please contact Julie Kettner at jkettner@noys.org with questions. You can follow us on Twitter @NOYSNoise and Facebook www.facebook.com/4NOYS or www.facebook.com/ActOutLoud.

Fix The Toaster

****originally wrote this on August , 2010. Today I wore my dead friend's dress, all day, with the tags still attached.

This dress has hung in my closet for a little over two years.  Since the day I, being the first person to enter her apartment after she died, found the dress hanging in her closet.

I've always eyed it, tried it on and taken it off. It's a sexier little piece then I normally wear. She teased me that I needed to dress sexier, show off more skin. Today, I decided to wear it. The Old Navy tag that told me she paid $34 dollars for it hung in the back and I wore an open mens button down all day, unbottened over it to hide the tag.

$34.

She died when she was 33, two weeks before her 34th birthday which would have been on May 13th 2008.

In January of 2008 I began writing politicians and news people trying to sell them on the fact that I believe too many people were dying in car accidents. I always ended saying I was lucky not to know anyone who had died in an automobile accident. She used to get mad at me saying I invited trouble sometimes by talking or worrying about things.

She died at 6:18PM on May 1st, my husband's 40th birthday. I had put my son to bed at 6:00PM then thought of her and our last dinner out together in Silver Lake(where we would go to look at hot guys with long hair), she told me I should take time to do special things together with my husband.

I was angry at him and tired as we had both been vomiting all week with the stomach bug and he'd been miserable about turning 40 anyways. But I thought of what she said and I brought a cupcake up to him a little after 6PM.

From my window I can see the freeway she died on.

Every night I look out onto the 101 and wonder how could she possibly have gone fast enough to have hit the Jersey barrier, flipped and stopped facing traffic. The site they must have seen.

The windshield came out and went right into her forehead and the steering wheel impacted her chest. Hard.

So hard.

She was running late to a catering gig. She was beautiful. Sweet. The bravest, prettiest woman I've ever met. By far.

Every year around 40,000 people die in the USA alone in car accidents.

That's fucking stupid. If you want my opinion.

When she died the news headline said something like "Traffic snarled for miles due to traffic fatality." As if her death was nothing more then an annoyance to other commuters trying to get home that night.

If the toaster killed 40,000 people annually we would all step back, unplug it then say, "Let's Fix the Toaster."