Monday, July 26, 2010
George Monbiot on the "war against the motorist":
"You can see the victims of the real war that's being waged – the war against road safety – in every hospital and mortuary up and down the land. Seven killed, 71 seriously injured, every day. About 120 children killed in Britain every year: 120 families plunged into lifelong grief.
Every two or three weeks I visit a spinal injuries unit in which a close friend is confined. He wasn't hurt on the roads, but many of the other patients were. Every time I walk though that hospital I see the broken bodies, the shattered hopes, the endless complications, both physical and psychological, caused by the war being waged on the roads. You will see something similar in wards which specialise in the loss of limbs and eyes, the smashing of faces, the crushing of brains. This is the closest most of us will get to seeing the aftermath of war, a shattering of lives that bears no relationship to what Penning so crassly describes as the war on the motorist.'
"You can see the victims of the real war that's being waged – the war against road safety – in every hospital and mortuary up and down the land. Seven killed, 71 seriously injured, every day. About 120 children killed in Britain every year: 120 families plunged into lifelong grief.
Every two or three weeks I visit a spinal injuries unit in which a close friend is confined. He wasn't hurt on the roads, but many of the other patients were. Every time I walk though that hospital I see the broken bodies, the shattered hopes, the endless complications, both physical and psychological, caused by the war being waged on the roads. You will see something similar in wards which specialise in the loss of limbs and eyes, the smashing of faces, the crushing of brains. This is the closest most of us will get to seeing the aftermath of war, a shattering of lives that bears no relationship to what Penning so crassly describes as the war on the motorist.'
Labels: war on the roads
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