Congress Shows Neglect With National Safety Month
Just a little bit over an hour ago, the House of Representatives voted unanimously to approve a resolution expressing support for the effort to establish June 2008 as National Safety Month.
Why? The resolution Congress voted on explains that the resolution was written because “after years of decline, the rate of unintentional injuries and deaths in the United States has risen to new and unacceptable levels.”
That’s where my doubt begins: If it’s the rate of unintentional injuries and deaths that’s the problems, what are we supposed to do about it? Try harder not to get hurt or die unintentionally? How can a person try harder to avoid something that’s accidental?
Then there are the problems of timing. The resolution was approved at 6:54 in the evening of June 9th. That means that already one quarter of National Safety Month has passed by without people recognizing that they should intend to reduce unintentional injury and death.
If National Safety Month could really make us all safer, well, it wouldn’t be very safe to go for 25 percent of National Safety Month without anyone even knowing that it’s National Safety Month, would it? In fact, this late resolution seems to be an example of the sort of neglect that causes unintentional injury and death in the first place.
Finally, if June is going to be National Safety Month, well then, what does that make the other eleven months of the year? Unsafe, obviously.
It’s no wonder that unintentional injuries and deaths in the United States have gone up so dramatically, what with eleven months out of the year being designated as unsafe in this reckless way.
