When the premiere episode of Trauma aired on NBC last night, I couldn’t help but notice that there was more than a small amount of irony involved. The series opened with a flashback (not a Flashforward) to a tragic helicopter crash that wiped out most of a trauma/rescue team—and forever altered the lives of the survivors—then quickly segued to a scene in which a drooling idiot, salivating at the prospect of sending a text message, seemed more intent on getting his message sent than on paying attention to evolving traffic conditions going on all around him while he speeds down the freeway.
The results, of course, were predictable; one just couldn’t tell exactly when the carnage would happen, or how severe it would be. As it turned out, it was pretty severe, indicating that the texter wasn’t the only incompetent driver on the road that day. Fortunately, this scenario was only a dramatization. Unfortunately, similar scenarios play out in real life, every day, on roadways all across America.
Enter the irony. A scant three hours earlier, Channel 6 News (CBS) aired the results of its daily opinion poll: 8% of respondents to the poll think that texting while driving shouldn’t be illegal. WTF?
Quick! Revoke their driver’s licenses and confiscate their cars. Those people are drooling idiots who lack essential skills (mainly attention span) needed to safely operate a moving vehicle of any kind. Get them off the road before they kill someone.
Yeah, I know, we have too many laws already, and we don’t need big brother constantly telling us what to do. Bullshit! It’s precisely because people can always be counted on to do the expedient thing, the convenient thing, the selfish thing, the greedy thing, or the stupid thing—and that they can rarely be counted on to do the right thing or even the required thing—that make some laws necessary.
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