I AGREE WITH A MAJOR WINGNUT

At least on this issue. Richard M. Weaver is another of the early conservative intellectuals, not quite as influential as Russell Kirk, but still someone worth reading if you want to find out what makes these people tick. In his book "Visions of Order: The Cultural Crisis of Our Time," he was also taken with the yearly carnage of motor vehicle accidents. This is from page 83:

The most appalling human sacrifice of Western society today is the toll taken by machine culture. As just suggested, our familiarity with these losses has caused us to accept them and to deaden our response to the horror of them. But suppose we make an attempt to see the facts with fresh eyes. In 196o in this country alone about 38,000 lives were taken by automobile accidents. But we cannot stop with this figure. There occurred along with these deaths tens of thousands of injuries, some of them permanently disabling. The same thing goes on in all of the modern Western countries. A recent Reuters dispatch from London states that since the turn of the century 235,000 persons have been killed on British roads, and the total figure for traffic casualties of all sorts is computed at 7,500,000.

[snip]

For a moment let us regard this as an empirical fact to be considered. It is a toll exceeding that of many wars and plagues, and it is annual. While indeed measures are constantly being, taken in the hope of cutting it down, there is never any thought of removing the cause. Not long ago Dr. John C. Bugher, Director of Medical Education and Public Health for the Rockefeller Foundation, observed that although automobile accidents kill nearly 40,000 Americans a year, we apparently consider this to be within reason "for the comfort and convenience of automobiles." Whether the director said this with a forced expression I do not know, but one can hardly challenge its truthfulness. It does not conceal the essential horror of this bargain for "comfort and convenience." A society should have very strong reasons for being willing to sacrifice 4o,000 lives a year and take care of several hundred thousand wounded. It certainly does not regard each human life as infinitely precious if it is willing to trade about 40,000 annually for something that is certainly not infinite.

I grew up in a small town in the northeastern corner of New York State and drunk driving seemed to be a past-time for all to many people in the 1960s. Just outside the town, there was an intersection on a large, open field. No matter which of the 4 approaches you took, you could see 400 yards from left to right. No matter, each summer there seemed to be at least one deadly accident at the intersection.

By the 1990s, the drunk driving laws in New York had become more severe and at one point, bartenders were given the right to take away the vehicle keys from a customer if the bartender felt that the person was too drunk to drive. (Generally, this was only done when the drinker had the keys laying on the bar, so there weren't any fights as far as I know.) Drinking and driving were so important to some people, especially males, that a friend of mine commented that taking away a guy's keys was like taking his manhood.