Why Weren’t Auto Accidents in North Carolina (and Elsewhere) More of an Issue in This Year’s Election?
2012’s election season has come and gone, for better or for worse, but the problem of auto accidents in North Carolina (and elsewhere in the U.S.) remains potent, unchecked, and terrifying, especially when you consider the stats.
For instance, as a New York Times piece reported a few months ago, the number of people who died in traffic accidents on U.S. roads in just the first three months of 2012 outnumbered the number of armed service people killed in both Iraq and Afghanistan over the past 11 years. The National Highway Traffic & Safety Administration (NHTSA) is busy calculating fatality and serious injury rates for the second, third, and fourth quarters of 2012. Hopefully, the news was somewhat more sanguine. But imagine if we had seen similar numbers of war fatalities in either Afghanistan or Iraq. You can be sure that the spike in bloodiness would have been front page news and would have sparked a political firestorm about ‘what should be done.’
A human life is a human life. Whether someone dies in combat or in a truck accidentÖ the situation is a tragedy, and we should strive to prevent similar awfulness from striking other people.
So what’s behind the political impotence, for lack of a better term? How come politicians are not more aggressively striving to get accident fatality rates down?
Consider these questions in the context of the following powerful truth: most of America’s most powerful politicians of the past two or three decades have been touched deeply by auto accidents.
• As we pointed out in a previous post, before Bill Clinton was even born, he lost his father in a car accident.
• Mitt Romney was in a serious car accident when he was a young adult in France — one passenger in that car died in that crash.
• Before she even became first lady – back when she was in high school – Laura Bush ran through a stop sign and killed a classmate.
• Joe Biden lost his wife and child in a car crash several decades ago.
• Barack Obama lost his father in a car crash.
• It goes on and on and on like this.
These politicians’ stories are not all that exceptional – almost everyone has been touched deeply by auto accidents in Charlotte and beyond. Yet we spend our time worrying about other problems – not nearly paying enough attention to this ‘elephant in the room.’
In our next post, we’re going to dive into this idea deeper – imagine what would happen if politicians treated the car accident prevention problem more seriously and used, perhaps, advanced types of business thinking (metrics, systems, business process analysis, etc.) to make our roads safer.
If you or someone you love has been hurt or has suffered damages in a car accident in Charlotte, get in touch with the DeMayo Law team today for a free, fair, and comprehensive consultation.
