Perspective: Osama vs. Ford, GM, Toyota, et al.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration cheerfully reports that highway fatalities dropped to a 30-year record low last year. In 2004, only 42,636 people died on America's highways. Alcohol played a role in 16,694 of those deaths. Motor vehicles killed 4641 pedestrians.

Let's see, Osama's boys killed 3000 people on September 11, 2001. In response, we went to war with two countries, passed the Patriot Act, and spent ourselves another trillion dollars in the hole (and counting). Yet every month we kill each other faster with our ever-larger motor vehicles without any great hue and cry raised to shut down the highways or at least make everyone ride bicycles. Irresponsible drinking outdoes 9/11 by more than a factor of 5 every year, yet the government doesn't ban alcohol ads or order cruise missile strikes on Milwaukee and St. Louis. My fellow pedestrians face a greater risk of death under the wheels of careless roadhogs than we do from al-Qaeda, but I'll bet the transportation bill just passed by Congress has little funding for increased sidewalk safety.

No, I'm not arguing that we should ban automobiles or even alcohol. But it seems odd that we accept the highway death toll as an unavoidable fact of life in our motorized society, acceptable losses, while a tiny fraction of that death and destruction caused by terrorism warrants military mobilization and revocation of various civil rights.