On July, 13th, we will again meet for an “AktMobCmp“ and dream of peaceful and active mobility. I take that as a motivation to write a polemic article against cars and weapons. On the other hand, it is not at all polemic. If it were not so sad, it would actually be hilarious.
Each year, millions of new cars are distributed around the planet. Most of them arrive at the customer, but more and more just sit there waiting. Sometimes many thousands of them in the desert (see CAREFUL – I also know about weapons – pistols, guns, machine-guns and bazookas.). Sometimes hundreds of them in our small world, at the small and medium-sized “second-hand car salespersons” that you find by the dozens along all the bigger and smaller streets that lead to and from our smaller and bigger cities.
But also the “registered” cars are only used sporadically, Mostly they sit around, often looking very stupid and blocking ways. They use up immense space plastered with concrete and steal the people their living areas. I do not find that nice. Except if all those cars were driving around all the time, that would be an unimaginable catastrophe. So it is probably better that they are sitting around.
Because it just does not make sense that the world is being packed with and overridden by more than one billion “motorized vehicles” and that there are probably already more car seats than humans.
Something must change – because this planet cannot survive it. But money reigns over the world – and cars are an excellent way to make money. After all, cars are perfect for the ego of the consumer-oriented person you find in our “modern and developed society”.
It is similar with weapons. Here, too, an unbelievable amount is produced each year. I truly do not know if the world spends more money on cars or on weapons. Both sums are probably unimaginable.
Weapons, too, are first and foremost status symbols. Perhaps even more so than cars. What the pistol or the gun is for Jim and John, the intercontinental ballistic rocket is for the powerful. And they all upgrade all the time. Even in Bavaria, because the state is becoming unsafe. The police because your Jim and John becomes more and more violent. And the NATO and its enemies because the general state of the world becomes more and more dangerous.
Both weapons and cars, however, are not only good for your ego. With weapons, too, you can really make a profit. Luckily, weapons – as opposed to cars or just like cars (?) – are mostly produced in reserve. From the business perspective, that makes no sense in the long run, because you must actually use them. So you will need wars. And whenever, through a huge effort, you actually get peace somewhere, you will want to create war somewhere else. It does not really take a huge effort. And if you want to remain in business, you will never want wars to end!
Luckily (for us) wars generally take place in a part of the world that is quite far away from us. Because we find war is a bad thing. Here in Europe, they declared war taboo. To be sure, we earn good money with wars, but we do not want to see the results.
Even if there is a little bit of terror, we overreact. Well, this is an absolute no-go. After all, we already have enough victims of our wars on the motorways and streets of our republic. That is enough. So we wage wars as far away from our borders as possible. And we are especially keen on fighting terror.
But woe if the weapons are used everywhere. That would be called world-war. That would mean an end to comfort and “over-and-out”. For all of us.
The cars already play at “world-war”. World-wide, they murder considerably more than a million persons each year (they say the number is 1.25 million, with many times ten-fold as many seriously wounded).
That is probably more than, so far, all weapons together manage to kill every year – even if we count and sum up with normal weapons victims (like in the USA), with those caused by terror attacks and those of all the “just wars” for or against some brain-damaged concepts.
There are absurdities both with weapons and cars! And if it were not so sad, one would have to find it hilarious.
For instance, there is a very modern cannon sitting on a very modern ship. Let us guess which “non-evil country” owns them. However, you are not allowed to use the cannon, because every shot costs 800,000 US-Dollars. It is particularly embarrassing if the ship we mentioned gets stuck in the Panama Channel. That was the Zumwalt (2016).
But there must be a time when the cannon of the Zumwalt has to be used. I am not all that familiar with it (after all, I served with the air force), but perhaps such an expensive shot will be worth it when, later on, a Chinese aircraft carrier is shot down. Allegedly, they are building quite a few of them now. Well, one would assume that the first shot has to be on target.
The MOAB, which, incidentally, was originally not called the mother of all bombs – the Pentagon would never come up with such a cynical name – too, had to be tried out at some time. And since they knew no better, they chose Pakistan. Because such a poor country cannot really fight back, and besides, it has to be liberated from the Taliban.
So they allegedly destroyed a huge subterranean Taliban complex. And because they had protected the civilians optimally before they threw the bomb, they knew the exact numbers of killed Taliban shortly after the bomb had been delivered. How wonderfully absurd.
As far as cars are concerned, I see the absurdities on a daily basis in the streets of Munich. Some of them are called SUVs and sometimes they have more horsepower than a truck or bus. And their emissions land right in my face and in my lungs, just like the smoke used to when someone sat opposite me eating their Pizza in the restaurant and smoking a cigarette.
A friend of mine suggested that they should first transfer the emissions of cars into the inside of the cars, before releasing them into the atmosphere. Riding my bike along the Rosenheimer Strasse, I am quite inclined to vote in favour of that idea.
With cars, we have a new development. Because even the terrorists, who are not very well-educated, have now found out what a good tool cars are when it comes to doing their job: the car as the best of all bombs. They use it more and more often. The cities and towns already start protecting their squares and pedestrians’ zones with bollards. Maybe we should invest in enterprises that make bollards?
I close my article with numbers from the German Federal Statistical Office about the war on our streets .
WIESBADEN – 239 persons died in traffic accidents in April 2017. According to the Federal Statistics Office (Destatis), this was eight fatalities or 3.2 % fewer than in April 2016. The number of injured persons decreased by 12.0 % to circa 28.300 compared the same month last year.
The number of persons killed between January and April 2017 was 867, which is more or less the same as in the same time period 2016 (865). Roughly 105,600 persons were injured during the first four months of 2017 on German streets, which is a decline of 2.9 % compared to the same interval in 2016. The number of accidents also declined. In the first four months of 2017, the police counted 790,400 traffic accidents, which is 1.4% less than last year. In 81,300 of these accidents, humans were injured (– 2.7 %) and in 709,000 accidents, there was only material damage (– 1.2 %).
Well, at least they say the number decreased. Regardless of the number of persons killed going up. But then, why bother with two more fatalities?
RMD
(Translated by EG)
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