It’s raining heavily and you are driving home. Windshield wipers are going as quickly as they can giving you the best view you can get given the weather conditions. You see car headlights heading your way and before you know it you are in a head on collision. Set aside who’s fault it is for a moment, just know your front bumper hit their front bumper, with both cars travelling at 65km/hr (40mph).
Cars today are designed to take a lot of the impact of a crash away from the people inside them. The front end of the car will buckle in front of the passenger cabin, and take the worst of the impact. That said, two things will help ensure greater safety for the drivers and passengers. First, there are seatbelts, and then there are airbags. But despite safety precautions, an impact like this could easily be fatal.
In this scenario, how safe would you want everyone to be? Would you like to know that both you and the person in the other car both had their seatbelt on, and that the airbags were present and deployed as expected?
Wouldn’t you want to know that you both did the best you could to protect yourselves?
Well, for all you anti-maskers out there, here is a simple analogy:
Poor weather = Pandemic, less than ideal conditions.
Car safety measures = Hospitals
Airbags = social distancing, protective distance between you and danger.
Seatbelt = Mask, personal protection.
The difference between a seatbelt and a mask is that your personal protection of a seatbelt in a car protects you, while a mask protects those in the community around you.
No one plans to get into a serious car accident, but they happen. When they do, the safety precautions you’ve taken might not be the same for the person or people in the other car. No one plans to spread a virus that might inconvenience some people, and kill others. No one wants an elderly family member or friend to die unnecessarily from something that could have been prevented, by something as simple as wearing a seatbelt or wearing a mask.
Don’t be an idiot. Buckle up. Mask up. Do it for your family, for those you love, and for those in the community that you live in. It’s your community. Do you want to be a good community member who shows that you care for those that are less fortunate than you? Or do you want to be thought of as reckless and stubborn? What kind of neighbour do you want to be?
Here’s a different point that one can take from the analogy you presented.
If we wanted to make everyone even safer, we could take all cars off the road entirely. 320 people die in British Columbia each year from vehicle-related accidents, but if we banned driving we could save most or all of those lives.
Does it mean that to NOT ban driving we don’t care about the lives of people killed in car accidents? No, not at all. But what it DOES mean is that as a society, the possibilities of death or serious injury are considered acceptable risks in the big picture of what it looks like to make our society function.
I say that as sort of a gentle pushback against those who argue passionately that “All the government cares about is the economy” or “they don’t value human lives” when it comes to keeping schools open. That’s just not the case.
What IS the case is that we all have differing definitions of what constitutes acceptable risk. And within that space, we need to respect points of view that differ from our own.
We all want the same things: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for ourselves and our loved ones. Where we differ is how to get there.
I said in a post recently, “The economy can stay open if people wear masks, socially distance themselves and sanitize appropriately. Some people might disagree with me, and on a topic like this we can agree to disagree.”
While we can agree to disagree on this… we are just stupid if we think that we can continue to not wear masks or make it optional for people, who get to choose and make excuses for not doing so.
The post: https://daily-ink.davidtruss.com/i-dont-agree-to-disagree/