Travel Reference
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emotion aside and being as logical as possible, we can weigh the relative risks and
rewards or costs and benefits of various American behaviors.
Every four and a half days, a 747's worth of people die on our highways. And
it's not worth headlines. We're a mighty nation of well over 300 million people.
People die. More than 30,000 people die on our roads every year. Anybody in that
business knows if we all drove 20 miles an hour slower, we'd save thousands of
precious lives. But in the privacy of the voting booth, is the average American go-
ing to vote to drive 50 mph on our freeways to save thousands of lives? Hell, no.
We've got places to go.
Consider guns. Every year in our country, more than 30,000 people are killed
by guns. You could make the case that it's a reasonable price to pay for the precious
right to bear arms. We are a free and well-educated democracy. We know the score.
And year after year, we seem to agree that spending these lives is a reasonable
trade-off for enjoying our Second Amendment right.
Germans decided not to have that right to bear arms, and consequently they lose
only about 1,000 people a year to guns. Europeans (who suffer less than a quarter
the per capita gun killings we do) laugh out loud when they hear that Americans are
staying home for safety reasons. If you care about your loved ones (and understand
the statistics), you'll take them to Europe tomorrow.
If we dispassionately surveyed the situation, we might similarly accept the hu-
man cost of our aggressive stance on this planet. We spend untold thousands of
lives a year for the rights to drive fast and bear arms. Perhaps more than 300 million
Americans being seen by the rest of the world as an empire is another stance that
comes with an unavoidable cost in human lives.
