Buns and I arrested a drunk a while back. Coming home from a night out with the boys, the drunk "accidentally" parked his Chevy 4x4 on top of a Toyota at a stop sign. The driver of the Toyota wasn't all that upset about the accident, probably because she was dead.
I felt it in my bones long before I heard about it on the news: after an eight-year decline in the number of alcohol-related traffic deaths, booze is making a comeback behind the wheel.
Society being what it is, I figured that it wouldn't take long before people started to think that drunk driving wasn't really that big of a deal. Some people have to learn the hard way. You can buy 'em books and show 'em movies, but none of that stuff works better than partial paralysis or permanent disfigurement.
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the reasons for the increase are anyone's guess. Public complacency might explain it, they say, as would younger drivers and higher speed limits.
Between 1994 and 1995, 1,082 more people got in alcohol-related traffic accidents than were statistically expected to die. Granted, not all of them were drunk. Some just happened to be in the way of a drunk going somewhere with a blood alcohol content so high that his spit could legally pass as a disinfectant.
I'm thinking that the real reason for the increase in DUI-related deaths is attributable to your basic American selfishness. Eighty percent of all Americans either think they-re too special to get killed, or don't care if they do. The remaining 20% not only don't care if they die, they also don't care if they help someone else get dead.
This explains why a drunk who doesn't care whether he lives or dies rarely chooses to drive off a cliff instead of the wrong way down the freeway. It may also explain why he'll do it again five days after getting out of jail.
If selfishness is a causative factor, so is freedom. Put the two together, add a human being, and you get trouble. As a species, we're smart enough to put people on the moon and eradicate disease, but we have trouble with simple stuff like booze = no driving.
Weirder still is that even though we're getting better about sending people into space, we're getting worse about drinking and driving.
Russia has a bigger percentage of alcoholics than the United States, but a much lower incident of alcohol-related traffic deaths. Know why? Because Russia isn't free enough yet to compound a vodka problem with a Volovo problem.
Conversely, 10 bucks will get just about anyone in this country a driver's license. Another six bucks will buy enough alcohol to reduce the average motorist's driving skills to the level of a squid.
Experts say they don't know if alcohol-related traffic deaths will continue to rise. I say they will and I'm not even an expert. It doesn't take one to know that real freedom gives a person as much chance to be good as it does to be bad.
The difference lies in which direction the person is inclined to go with their freedom. Usually, it's over the top of you. Driving home during rush hour is bad enough, never mind adding booze.
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