waltondammerung

Tristemente chapin

I'm not sure whether this news made it out of California, but there was an accident out in the dessert this morning involving 20 illegal immigrants packed into a van.. No one was wearing seatbelts, 5 people were killed and 15 were injured when the van went off the road and rolled over. I heard a woman on the radio this afternoon villifying the driver of the van as a money-grubbing devil who cares more about making a buck than about safety. Now, I agree that this was a totally unsafe situation, and I would try to avoid putting people in that situation myself, but doesn't this woman realize that's how a lot of people travel in Central America? There just aren't that many cars, so when you have one, you share. I remember sharing the back of a family friend's pickup with my brother, the friend's three kids, and at least 3-4 other people we picked up on the way to wherever we were going. And we were probably the least crowded vehicle on the road. I think it's a lot more likely that this guy had a van and decided to share it. Yes, even with people he doesn't know. (Okay, so the van appears to have been stolen, but that's another issue. No one knows how stole it or how it came into the driver's hands.) This certainly doesn't decrease the tragedy of what happened, but jumping to conclusions about a dead man's motives for piling lots of people in his van certainly doesn't help.