{"id":607,"date":"2007-03-02T21:55:46","date_gmt":"2007-03-02T21:55:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/voteforjoe.com\/wheresjoe\/?p=40"},"modified":"2007-03-02T21:55:46","modified_gmt":"2007-03-02T21:55:46","slug":"3207","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/?p=607","title":{"rendered":"3\/2\/07"},"content":{"rendered":"

Before moving to the inner city of Cleveland, we lived in Bluffton, Ohio. I used to take the kids to watch the Bluffton University Baseball Team. \u00a0 Some of this year’s team members died today in a tremendously tragic bus accident in Atlanta. \u00a0 And it must be horrific for everyone involved. \u00a0 But as tragic as this one accident is, every 13 seconds<\/em> someone is killed on American highways. \u00a0 That translates to 33,000 deaths a year. \u00a0 We’ve lost some 3,100 U.S. Service people in the last three years of the Iraq War. \u00a0 When you compare the figures, our highways are nothing less than a ‘war zone.’ \u00a0 We’d just never look at it that way — because we are so<\/em> addicted to high-speed, motor vehicle transportation. \u00a0 Yet that doesn’t in anyway make it any less wrong? \u00a0 And like any addict, our society has come up with a series of rationalizations to justify \u00a0our addiction… Driving through mid-Florida today, we noticed several roadside accident scene crosses, flowers, and small signs that read: Drive Carefully<\/strong>… Should we be driving carefully, or should we be driving at all? \u00a0 The Amish have chosen not to drive motor vehicles because they pollute, are detrimental to family and community building (because instead of being at home or in the neighborhood a lot, now we always seem to be ‘en route’), and they increase the chances of death or maiming exponentially. \u00a0 And the Amish believe to kill someone is a very serious thing, no matter how it happens. \u00a0 Moral theologians (who drive) would, for the most part, \u00a0spiritually pass a traffic \u00a0fatality off to “unintended consequences.” \u00a0 Yet objectively, if we know driving is helping cause global warming and also increases the chances of maiming or killing someone \u00a0in an accident, doesn’t \u00a0getting in \u00a0a car and strapping (or not) ourselves in, our children in — knowing there are other options (like staying home more, \u00a0walking \u00a0and shopping locally, et al.) — become an immoral act? \u00a0 Whether we have an accident, or not. \u00a0The mere fact that we’re being lazy in, say, not walking, or bicyling, \u00a0would seem \u00a0a sin. \u00a0 (Intent is 9\/10ths — if not 10\/10ths — of the ‘spiritual’ law.) And increasing the possibility of \u00a0taking \u00a0our life, or our childrens’ lives, or other drivers’ lives… in the face of knowing how dangerous driving is, could also well be considered sin. Note:<\/strong> \u00a0 How many more fatal highway tragedies is it going to take for us to wake up to this? \u00a0 And more, how much further along the global warming continuum will we go before we wake up to this? The key is nothing short of changing the whole transportation infra-structure in line with reverting back to a decentralized society — like in the old days, before motorized vehicles.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Before moving to the inner city of Cleveland, we lived in Bluffton, Ohio. I used to take the kids to watch the Bluffton University Baseball Team. \u00a0 Some of this year’s team members died today in a tremendously tragic bus …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=607"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/607\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}