Saturday, April 28th 2007
World’s Greatest Threat: ourselves?
Tony Blair said this week that the world’s greatest threat was bar driving. Car accidents kill “on the scale of malaria or tuberculosis”. While bad driving is a huge killer of people, it seems absurd to call it a “threat”. It would be like saying our greatest threat is obesity. Semantics aside, this bothers me on two levels.
First, ignoring other rather large global “threats” like the spread of terrorism, AIDS, pandemic diseases in general, or global warming, if that is your preference. Some people would list it, I ordinarly wouldn’t. Ignoring these things that are much more sinister (possibly because we have less control over them) seems negligent and kind of stupid, given the current world situation. It would be like saying, during World War II, that the greatest threat was the rubber shortage.
Second, why do car accidents occur? Lots of reasons, traffic, road rage, negligence/lack of paying attention, bad weather, intoxication of varying sorts, etc. Some of these things we can’t change, like weather and traffic, but some we CAN. Drivers are responsible for driving and dealing with things they can’t change. Just like with obesity, people are responsible for their eating and life choices while dealing with the genetic obstacles they might have. These things are individual decisions, not “threats”. Let’s stop fueling the culture of victimhood by giving people the message that these health hazards are faceless threats rather than choices we can make.
