Yet every year this country remembers and honors the 3,000 (roughly) deaths from 9/11 in 2001 but has absolutely no memorial and nothing to honor the 17,448 alcohol related deaths in 2001. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration broke down those 17,448 deaths in 2001 as follows:
- Estimate is that 8,000 deaths involved only a single car and in most of those cases the only death was the drunk driver
- 5,000 sober victims were killed by legally drunk drivers
- and there were 2,500 to 3,500 crash deaths in which no driver was legally drunk but alcohol was detected
So congratulations to us as Americans for continually disregarding over 17,000 deaths and choosing instead to remember every year just 3,000 deaths. Congratulations to us on spending billions to fight terrorism and yet letting drunk drivers walk off with a short jail sentence or a slap on the wrist. We definitely have our priorities straight, right? I mean our behavior as Americans clearly demonstrates we're far more interested in 3,000 deaths that happened years ago than 17,000 deaths per year that are preventable. These 9/11 memorials make me embarrassed to be an American. I'll fly an American flag proudly when we have an annual memorial for the 17,000 people that died that same year as a result of drunk driving. Those 17,000 people were mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, children, grandparents, high school kids and somebody's best friend. They were Americans.
