Surprisingly, this isn’t about *him* today.


The United States of America is a queer place. We could literally do anything. We’ve done it before; we’ve won world wars, eradicated disease, stepped on the moon, you name it.

Today, we choose not to politically…which of course is an entirely different blog.

How do we get to do those things, and visit those places?

Somebody has to die.

Of course, we could take steps to reduce risk. Ever wonder why our food used to be safe to eat, or cars don’t explode anymore, and airplanes used to not routinely fall out of the sky?

All of these things came as a result of hard experience….and dozens, if not hundreds of deaths.

It doesn’t have to be so. We have the power as a society to implement rules and safeguards to protect people, and ensure they don’t die for preventable things.
Again, as a society…we choose not to.

It’s all about profit, of course. So many things could be dramatically improved for the better, safer, and more efficient. Except that costs money to do, so we don’t. Unless enough people die, and it becomes less expensive to change things so corporate America doesn’t need to keep paying fines and settling lawsuits.

Enough of my soapbox, though. Let’s move on to what inspired my rant today.

You know I drive a bus for a living. There is a non-zero chance every day that I get behind the wheel that something horrific or even fatal may occur. We can, of course, take steps to reduce the risk. This week, my employer chose not to, and I’ve been driving into a hazardous situation each and every day.

My concerns have fallen on deaf ears, and it has provoked considerable rage on my behalf, to the point where I have informed my colleagues that I am re-evaluating my continued employment, as I do not wish to work for a company so uninterested in safety concerns that it constitutes a real hazard.

There’s so much more…but consider that on Tuesday, the first day I drove to a new stop (which is in an industrial neighborhood with heavy trucking, no streetlights, and no crosswalks), not once, not twice, not thrice, but FOUR TIMES I nearly had head-on collisions with wrong-way drivers lost in that poorly-signed part of my fair city.

We also have similar concerns about safety on the campus. Thousands of students drive to class every day, and they are as distracted as you think they would be. Crosswalks, stop signs, bus stops, and other traffic control measures have no meaning for them.
We raised our concerns to the Bentley Police Department last spring….and they too, perhaps shackled by the college administration, literally told us that “Nothing will change until somebody gets hurt.”

Do we not see the problem with this?