Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Makes You Wonder Why

The leading news story tonight is about a police chief killed in a single car accident. His pick up truck blew a tire, he lost control and was ejected from the vehicle. He was not wearing a seat belt.

Last June, in the same town, the mayor was killed in a traffic accident. He was a career firefighter. He was not wearing a seat belt.

The news is both sad and perplexing. Wearing a seat belt is the law in their state. Surely both knew that. In fact, the chief was sworn to enforce the law. The firefighter has no doubt seen way too many traffic fatalities not to know that wearing them saves lives. His department has a policy that when riding fire apparatus the truck doesn't roll until everyone has their seat belt buckled.

Would the seat belts have saved their lives. I guess we'll never know.

Makes you wonder why we do the very things we know are wrong and don't do the things we know are right, doesn't it? But we do.

1 comment:

Rebecca Meyers said...

Agreed. So sad. This happened in my home town and I know both men. The mayor was my childhood babysitter's husband and the recent officer was a well known man on the Shore. It's hard to imagine that they wouldn't wear their seat belts. But, I find more and more often that we live the "Do as I say, not as I do" way. A lesson for a lot of us in many aspects of life. LIVE rather than die by example.