In Memorium

A mutual friend told me this morning that this accident took the life of an acquaintance of mine Monday morning. I remember running into Ron not long after moving back to Baton Rouge--he recognized me, it took me a minute to remember him.

While not a close friend, I'm truly saddened by his passing. Ron was a very good person. He and his twin brother Don were military veterans and political progressives. To be honest, I forget if it was he or his brother that became fluent in German while stationed overseas--maybe both did--nor do I recall if it was he or Don who whispered a general translation to me of Triumph of the Will, which I sat in on when it was screened in an advanced German class at LSU.

I also recall a number of parties I attended back in the eighties at their apartment--which always had a nice international flavor.

The stretch of interstate where the accident occurred is pretty awful. It is VERY poorly designed. Jackson, Mississippi has a similar curve--a highway with speeds like what you see on an interstate really shouldn't have anything like this. They've reduced the speed limit at the location, but cars and trucks routinely ignore the lower limit.

Accidents which result in death and injury on highways are a global problem. Yesterday, before I learned the news about Ron, I came across this article and almost made a short post about it.

Imagine if once a month, every month, like clockwork in cities across America, terrorists leveled a building like they leveled the World Trade Center -- killing more than 2,700.

42,000 highway deaths average out to MORE than one 9/11 attack a month, but the comparison is apt.

[Motor vehicle] accidents killed 1.26 million men, women and children worldwide in 2000. Twenty-five percent of all fatal injuries worldwide, in fact, occured in auto accidents. War accounted for 6 percent...

The global impact of motor vehicle accidents is staggering: in addition to the dead, about 50 million each year are injured. The World Health Organization and World Bank, which together produced the "World Report on Road Traffic Injury Prevention," estimated the annual cost of accidents at 1 percent of the gross national product in low-income countries, 2 percent in middle-income countries and 3 percent in high-income countries like the United States -- for a total of $518 billion.

Every day, millions of us are a split second away from becoming another grim statistic. Unfortunately, this happened to Ron. He will be missed.