Invisible Massacre

Here is part of the ever thoughtful Archbishop Chaput's article in "First Things" on 2nd June 2009. He was reflecting on the uses of technology. He mentions the downside of the invention of cars. "traffic jams, oil dependency and pollution". Is he leaving something out.....like mass carnage? The fact that such an intelligent writer could omit the most obvious downside of widespread car use is testimony to how invisible death on the roads is.

Yesterday's Air France disaster over the Atlantic finally pushed the Members of Parliament expenses row off the top of the British news agenda for a day - this never ending scandal went down to the Number 2 slot for a day, so I expect it to be back at Number 1 tomorrow and for every day until a General Election is called or the "Daily Telegraph" runs out of politicians to destroy. 228 people have probably died in that crash. The death toll on the British roads, among the safest in the world, is 3,000 a year - more than 12 Air France disasters. The death toll on US roads is over 40,000 a year - an Air France disaster every two days.

The Chicago Tribune ran a series of articles some time ago about Illinois high school students killing themselves in a series of gruesome and easily avoided accidents (e.g. if they had been driving sober or at less than 100 mph). Perhaps older or younger citizens' lives were less valuable or less newsworthy, because I never saw any similar series on accidents involving other drivers. But most of the time road deaths never make the news unless it is an exceptionally high death toll.
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"The historian Edward Tenner once warned that every new technology brings with it a "revenge of unintended consequences." We invent cars, for example, to move us more quickly--and of course, they do. But we also end up with traffic jams, oil dependency and pollution. We're never as smart as we think we are. The modern scientific mind likes to imagine itself as Prometheus, the hero of Greek myth who's punished by Zeus for stealing fire from the gods and giving it to humans. But we're really much more like the Sorcerer's Apprentice: smart enough to use the Master's magic, but not smart enough to know where it leads or how to control it.
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