traffic fatalities

What We Worry About vs. What We Should Worry About

in

I hear briefly today that there is a meningitis outbreak in the states.

I just read about it too as it was on the front page of Yahoo. The article says 15 people have died.

Today, I wonder? Because about 115 people will die today, give or take in their cars. 3,287 people die a day around the whole world in their cars.

It is sad that some people will die from this and of course awful. My point is not to diminish meningitis but rather point a question towards us.

Are we just a bunch of fatalists when it comes to us and our relationship to cars?

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Worried more with what we can not control rather then what we can?

Most car accidents can be prevented yet we do not have daily headlines scaring the beegeesus out of the American public about it.

 

Walking To School

in

Having recently moved to an LA suburb I was excited to be in a "family community." My new area does not have sidewalks everywhere, we live close to our school and so we walk out child to school.

We literally hug the curb as cars come barreling down the hill at a speed I'm pretty sure is over 25MPH.

We have a crosswalk guard who confessed to me a month ago, she' surprised no one has been killed walking or dropping their kid off at school. Yikes.

I started talking to other parents and they all shook their heads, yes, saying they too had noticed how fast people were driving through the neighborhoods, I would safely say some go 40.

I also spoke to one mom who said she could walk, BUT DID NOT FEEL SAFE doing so. That's nuts.

Do you feel safe walking your kid to school?

I called the local non-emergency sheriff's number and he said he would send some patrol guys over to ticket. I said great but more then that I really just want a switch in the drivers minds to happen.

I started going off on my tangent with the crosswalk and another mom. The mom snarked, they won't change. I asked her, don't you think they'd feel bad if they killed a kid? I asked her if she thought people would still be flying if more then 1/2 million Americans had died in airplanes since 9/11. I saw her mind change gears. Her face softened. She got my perspective.

I'd love to hear from you. How is your child's drop off? Do you walk to school? Do people speed in your neighborhoods?

 

Fix The Toaster

in ,

****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."