A Great Unspoken Truth about North Carolina Car Crashes
What can we do to make North Carolina car crashes “go away,” so that our roads will be essentially 100% safe?
How can we make drivers treat each other humanely, even under difficult conditions, inclement weather, etc?
Before you get lost in pondering these questions, stop. The questions are fundamentally absurd. The idea that we could ever hope to achieve a 100% safety rate in any endeavor in our life is comically absurd. Life is inherently a risky affair. Indeed, stop and contemplate the odds that you were even lucky enough to be born – they were astronomically stacked against you. All along the path of life, we constantly face risks. Even just sitting and lying on your bed too long can lead to bedsores, which can lead to sepsis (infection) and death. What’s more, out attempts to cocoon ourselves against the specter of risk can backfire in unexpected ways. The over-use of antibiotics, for instance, can prevent you from building up an effective immune system and thus, ironically, render you more predisposed to catching colds.
Many researchers now believe that our fear of dietary saturated fat (the idea that eating fat leads to heart disease) led us down the path of consuming way too many unhealthy simple carbohydrates and sugars… thus accidentally making us sicker and fatter.
The problem when we talk about issues like auto safety or diets or sun exposure or any other factor in life where you can “overcompensate” in both directions (getting “too much” of something or getting “too little” of it) is that you can easily become ideological. If you say that, for instance, no car accident prevention scheme will be 100% effective, some people might take that conclusion too far. They’ll then say “okay, life is risky. So why bother trying to make cars safer in the first place, then?”
That’s missing the point!
The point is that questions like “how can we make North Carolina cars and roads safer?” are fundamentally complex. They are not easily distilled down to a sound bite or a one word answer.
And until we develop the language — and a culture of thinking — that respects this kind of complexity, we are always going to be oversimplifying our problems and oversimplifying the solutions to those problems to the detriment of the intention of our quests.
More Web Resources:
Are we getting too much sunlight…or too little?
Are we eating too much fat…or too little?
