Absolutely Tragic North Carolina Auto Accident Takes Life of Kindergartener
Last Saturday, a horrific tragedy struck when a careless motorist crossed the center line and killed a 6-year-old flower girl on her way to a wedding – this heartrending North Carolina auto accident is difficult to describe, and its trauma will echo for a long time.
According to an AP report, 6-year-old Ava Kendall was killed and two bridesmaids were injured “when their car was hit head-on by another vehicle as they drove to a wedding in North Carolina.” Prosecutors are considering charging the driver of the other vehicle, 39-year-old Mupin Wu Cummings. Ava was going to be a flower girl at the wedding of her babysitter. When the bride heard the news of the accident, she fell stricken and collapsed in grief.
The AP story pointedly ends on a note of remembrance for the lost 6-year-old: “the vivacious, red-haired flower girl was remembered for her love of cowboy boots and the color pink.”
What can we learn from this absolute tragic North Carolina car accident? Is there really anything to learn, or is it just another example of the awful and arbitrary nature of tragedy?
Before we dive into the policy, let’s first reflect on how difficult it is to dissociate our emotions about stories like this from our intellectual responses. No one wants the situations like this to occur. We want any possible perpetuators punished – not just including potentially Ms. Cummings, but also possibly the maker or manufacturer of defective parts that might have caused her to swerve across the road or even the municipal agency responsible for engineering the roads such that accidents like this could happen.
But as urgently and as feverishly as we want to take action to stop tragedies like this, we also need to reflect on the dangers of acting hastily or acting without good information. The law of unintended consequences can lead to terrible situations. For instance, as science journalist Gary Taubes reviewed in his 2008 book, Good Calories, Bad Calories, unfounded fears that dietary fat can cause heart disease led the USDA and other governmental health institutions to recommend that Americans replace fat in their diets with sugar, including high-fructose corn syrup. Today, tremendous amounts of research suggest that high-fructose corn syrup and other sugars may cause or contribute to a health ailments, including the obesity and diabetes epidemic (also often referred to sometimes as a same epidemic, the “diabesity” epidemic).
This is an example of the law of unintended consequences. Sometimes, in the attempt to right a terrible wrong, we can make policy decisions that end up back firing.
The general moral here is that we must take time to reflect upon the profound tragedy of situations like this kindergartener’s death. But we also must be vigorous in demanding policy solutions that truly respond to the problems that we have — and that rely on good data and testing to ensure that they best suit the public’s needs.
Have you been hurt in a car crash? Connect with a North Carolina Car Accident Law Firm today. More Web Resources:
Ava Kendall tragedy
Law of Unintended Consequences
