We Need to Put Lives Before Travel

Every year in America, more than 30,000 people die in car accidents.

That number is not expected to go down any time soon.

During the coronavirus pandemic, we decided that it was very important to put lives before the economy. We decided that dooming generations to poverty was a small price to pay to protect people in their 80s and 90s from dying of a flu virus.

We also decided that protecting these elderly was worth sacrificing all of our most basic freedoms, which were guaranteed us in the Constitution, and before that, in the Magna Carta, and before that, in various ancient Greek and Roman legal systems. We decided that we could prevent people from moving around, we could prevent them from running their businesses, we could prevent them from practicing their religion.

We decided that we could silence freedom of speech, in order to protect someone from hearing something different about a virus.

Now, we need to ask ourselves: what about cars?

We’ve clearly become a more compassionate society in the last decades. The Hong Kong flu pandemic in 1968 killed 4 million, and we didn’t respond by collapsing our entire economy and stripping everyone of their rights. Now, we understand that lives matter, more than anything, and that creating misery and destruction is a small price to pay to stop a few people from dying.

So the time has come to say it: we need to shut down the automobile industry. People are dying. Is it worth death, simply to travel around in a car? If we can prevent this death by banning cars, don’t we have a duty to do so?

The answer, based on the new compassionate value system we’ve created, is: of course.

Society has changed in 2020. We have realized that there is no price that isn’t worth paying to stop people from dying.

It’s time to ban cars.