Snipers and sudden death

Thank goodness I don’t live in Washington.” As the Washington, D.C., sniper grabbed national media attention late last month, many citizens from Maine to California expressed such sentiments. With the perpetrator(s) now apparently apprehended, the nation celebrated return to its “normal way of life” – and the largely unreported carnage of that life can resume its usual pace.

That a single sniper managed so thoroughly to disrupt a major metropolitan area is itself a story worthy of more attention. At the peak of his activity the sniper was randomly killing or seriously wounding about one of every five million people a day.

Over any two-week stretch of the year, another lethal instrument inflicts its own random violence. Yet that violence never seems to occasion alteration of plans or sustained public discussion. Cars and their drivers kill or are killed at the rate of 40,000 a year. As many as 200,000 drivers sustain lifelong injuries. A typical metropolitan area with five million residents can be expected to experience at least one traffic- related killing a day.

In large metropolitan areas, highway carnage is buried deep within local papers and hardly ever receives much local television coverage. Though the sniper surely did not intend to save lives, some lives in the District of Columbia may well have been spared because of the pervasive threat he was deemed to pose. Residents trimmed their endless shopping trips and daily commutes, limiting what my wife terms “automotive roulette.”

Some have argued that traffic deaths are “routine” and thus are not a subject for feature news stories. Yet suicide bombings have, unfortunately, become an all too routine fact of life in Israel. Such attacks are still a regular feature not only in the Israel media but often on U.S. television as well.

A foreign foe that annually killed 40,000 people would be nuked into the Stone Age. Highway deaths may not be attributable to one identifiable foe, but neither are they acts of God. Modern societies crave, as they should, a high degree of mobility. Nonetheless, the private auto is not the only way to achieve such mobility. Indeed, private vehicles are increasingly inefficient. Even in the “off season,” my regular trips from Southwest Harbor to a tennis club in Ellsworth now take me nearly 10 minutes more than just a decade ago.

Maine has a low rate of violent crime, but just on our small island, drivers between 16 and 21 have been involved in more than a thousand reportable auto accidents over the last ten years. In just the last five years, that same age group has experienced five fatalities and 29 incapacitating injuries.

Yet even as our cars provide ever less safe and convenient transit, social policy proceeds along the same track – or should I say road. Maine’s political and business leaders cheer the possibility of a new east-west highway, forgetting that trains might provide safer, faster, and more sustainable means of moving both people and products between the United States and Canada. The Bush administration continues its campaign against Amtrak and mass transit, arguing that subsidies for urban and rural public transit are wrong. Yet federal, state and local expenditures, for police, for highway construction, and for soldiers in the Middle East are surely nothing if not props for cheap driving.

Why does a society obsessed over one sniper turn a blind eye toward vastly greater daily carnage? I can only speculate, but the question should be asked and debated more fully than heretofore. We have a culture that celebrates technology not merely as a collective instrument of power over nature but as a means of providing individuals with a full measure of that power. Even stuck in traffic, many Americans still cling to the ideal that vehicle, choice of time, and route are “theirs.” And the very problems that cars now foster constitute new challenges to be overcome. If cars crash now, surely better steering, highways, and navigational systems are just around the corner.

If our culture celebrates technology, so also do we value individual responsibility. Just as the NRA likes to tell us that people – not guns – kill, so too we assume that bad drivers-not cars – kill.

Sensible campaigns to punish drunken drivers or promote designated drivers have led to some gains in auto safety. But for my taste, the auto asks too much of even the most conscientious and sober designated driver. In no other activity in which I engage, save tennis, am I required to give total moment-to-moment concentration. If that concentration falters on the tennis court, I risk losing a point, a game, at worst a match. If it falters behind the wheel, I risk the loss of my life. Demanding that level of responsibility and attention for many hours a week is an unreasonable imposition, one for which most of us were probably not designed.

John Buell is a political economist who lives in Southwest Harbor. Readers wishing to contact him may e-mail messages to jbuell@acadia.net.