Blood on the Road
Just over the wires was a report on an accident near Kibbutz Gonen, where I lived during my army service. It was a head-on accident on a curving, single-lane road with no divider, uphill, with a drunk drivers shaken taken from one car, a body and four kids taken from the other.
I drove that road just a couple of months ago. Even sober it was dangerous: busses rocketing to a local watering hole naturally took up a lane and a half, and knowing where one could swerve saved my life more than once when I lived there.
My cousin, his spouse and son were killed in a death accident back in 1982. Killed by my cousin's son, an F-16 pilot with more balls than sense, who managed to get T-boned at an intersection after swerving around speed bumps and ignoring a 4-way stop sign to speed to his death and decades of pain for his orphaned brother and sister. I drove past there too. I do it every time I'm in Israel. Mussa was a gentle human being, a cornerstone of the Kibbutz Movement and a member of Israel's Parliment. The son of that man, who helped me understand the Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam, of working towards changing the world for the better, shattered the world of tens of thousands around him with his singular act of suicidal stupidity.
It never ceases to amaze me how countries seem to take drunk driver assaults in particular and automobile accidents in general as a 'cost of doing business' in a modern society. Israel loses, each year, more people from vehicular slaughter than from all military and terrorist activities combined. Combined! Yet, just as the United States blindly invests in jails and law enforcement to the detriment of education and well-child care, Israel pours more and more money into yeshivot, special interest groups and kleptocratic squabbles, and then in pristine, wide toll roads, rather than taking a serious, sustained and long term investment in the police infrastructure and roads.
Studies show that the stress of terror and war directly correlate to car accidents. But the limp, passive, reactive, and ticket-oriented way in which the Israeli Police act doesn't act as a counterweight to such behavior.
America has been a great friend of Israel, and a financial as well as political contributor to many valid and important goals of my Jewish State -- starting with its continued existence.
Friends don't let friends drive -- or spend -- drunk.
I drove that road just a couple of months ago. Even sober it was dangerous: busses rocketing to a local watering hole naturally took up a lane and a half, and knowing where one could swerve saved my life more than once when I lived there.
My cousin, his spouse and son were killed in a death accident back in 1982. Killed by my cousin's son, an F-16 pilot with more balls than sense, who managed to get T-boned at an intersection after swerving around speed bumps and ignoring a 4-way stop sign to speed to his death and decades of pain for his orphaned brother and sister. I drove past there too. I do it every time I'm in Israel. Mussa was a gentle human being, a cornerstone of the Kibbutz Movement and a member of Israel's Parliment. The son of that man, who helped me understand the Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam, of working towards changing the world for the better, shattered the world of tens of thousands around him with his singular act of suicidal stupidity.
It never ceases to amaze me how countries seem to take drunk driver assaults in particular and automobile accidents in general as a 'cost of doing business' in a modern society. Israel loses, each year, more people from vehicular slaughter than from all military and terrorist activities combined. Combined! Yet, just as the United States blindly invests in jails and law enforcement to the detriment of education and well-child care, Israel pours more and more money into yeshivot, special interest groups and kleptocratic squabbles, and then in pristine, wide toll roads, rather than taking a serious, sustained and long term investment in the police infrastructure and roads.
Studies show that the stress of terror and war directly correlate to car accidents. But the limp, passive, reactive, and ticket-oriented way in which the Israeli Police act doesn't act as a counterweight to such behavior.
America has been a great friend of Israel, and a financial as well as political contributor to many valid and important goals of my Jewish State -- starting with its continued existence.
Friends don't let friends drive -- or spend -- drunk.
posted by Da Shlom at Tuesday, September 20, 2005
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