[*] Another reason to camp in Crawford, TX?

I was doing some current-events reading, and have found that there is a place where a lot of people are dying – not just people mind you, but our sons and daughters. The statistics from 2002 -2004 are startling: on average, 47 of these young people upon who we have placed our hopes and dreams are killed every day. Mind you, I am sure they all volunteered to go, and they went knowing the danger because they were trained to deal with it, but it doesn’t make losing them any more or less horrible. Frankly, I’m shocked that someone isn’t doing something about this because the President just signed a bill into law that is going to spend $268.4 billion which funds the future deaths of young people.

“Where is this place?” you might be asking – or perhaps you are simply packing your bags to go to Crawford, TX to draw some media attention to this horrible national disgrace. Well, if you are, don’t drive there – because “this place” is the United States, and the bill is the newest Federal Transportation bill President Bush just signed into law. In 2002 and 2004, on average, 47 people between the ages of 15 and 34 were killed every day in driving fatalities (source: here and here) and on average in Iraq, among our combat troops, an average of 3.5 soldiers have been killed every day since we invaded.

An interesting comparison is that for every US Soldier killed in Iraq, 55 enemy combatants have been killed, but that doesn’t solve the problem of our children dying for the sake of oil right here in the US. Seriously now: what other excuse could there be? We are letting our children die so that the oil companies can become rich and fat – because if we stopped letting kids aged 15-24 drive, we’d cut the number of licensed drivers by almost 30% (about 54.7 million drivers), and that would undoubtedly cut our consumption of gasoline. Why go on sending our kids to die for oil?

That’s not to make light of the men and women who are serving in the military: that’s to show that the argument “those who favor the war in Iraq have no regard for human life” is a shallow, pointless argument. It can’t be applied to a much more common case where young people are losing their lives at a high rate.

Interesting study: we lose more soldiers in traffic wrecks than we do in training and combat combined.