ARCHIVED POSTS
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March 15, 2018
Is World Going Faster Or Am I Slowing Down?
ON THE ROAD AGAIN / Photo by George Cunningham
Sometimes in life, there may be more than one way of looking at things, and all of them can be right. Take traffic, for instance. Driving across country, it seems to me that people are driving faster and faster and closer and closer together.
I’m not the only one thinking this.
Economics professor Sam Peltzman first described this in a paper he published in 1975 that suggested that as cars become safer, drivers are more willing to take more chances on the highway. This became known as the Peltzman effect. I think the professor was on to something, although traffic deaths have gone down during the ensuing years – partly because of vehicle safety standards, a crackdown on drunk driving, restricting teen access to booze and fewer teens behind the wheel.
On the other hand, traffic engineers say that speed limits do little to make highway safer, since drivers tend to ignore such limits and end up driving at whatever speed seems safe to them. As evidence, they cite President Jimmy Carter’s ill-fated attempt to impose a 55 mph speed limit in order to save gasoline. After a short period everybody was ignoring the new limit and driving at the same speeds they were prior to the presidential edict.
When you chart the speed at which people drive in the real world, you find a big difference between the slow drivers and the fast drivers. But one thing they have in common is that they’re both dangerous.
Traffic engineer and consultant Tom Sohrweide says lowering the posted speed limit does not slow down traffic or increase safety, and raising the posted speed limit does not make people drive faster. Studies have shown that 85 percent of motorists drive at around the same speed, no matter what the posted limit is. And this turns out to be the safest speed. The speedsters and the slow pokes have the most accidents because the speedsters are going so fast they have to weave in and out of traffic and the slow pokes are getting in everybody’s way and causing accidents.
As cars become faster and safer, drivers are inclined to increase their speed. But even as the average driver goes faster, they are still safer than drivers that are either going faster than the flow of traffic or slower.
None of which seems to contradict what Sam Peltzman said more than 40 years ago.
Unfortunately, as the world is going faster and faster, I am getting older and older. My personal strategy has been to go as fast as everybody else, but I give myself an edge by leaving more room between me and the drivers ahead of me.
Of course that doesn’t do much to stop some of the speedsters from running up on my tail or some of the slow pokes from getting in my way. Like we used to say in the 60s. You ride with the tide and you go with the flow.
And you try not to do something stupid along the way.
Do you have a dissenting opinion or any opinion at all on the subject? Contact me at george@georgeleecunningham.com and let me know. Meanwhile, you can always subscribe and get an email reminder of blog postings. Your name will not be shared and you may cancel at any time.
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February 11, 2018
Killers of the Flower Moon
MOLLIE BURKHART AND HER HUSBAND ERNEST. HER MOTHER AND THREE SISTERS WERE KILLED BEFORE HER HUSBAND WAS ARRESTED. SHE WAS BEING SLOWLY POISONED BY THE FAMILY DOCTOR, WHO TOLD HER SHE WAS RECEIVING MEDICINE FOR HER DIABETES. ERNEST LATER CONFESSED AND WAS SENTENCED TO LIFE IN PRISON. — Oklahoma Historical Society, Oklahoman Collection
I have never been a believer in the goodness of people.
Folks who go around saying “people are basically good,” have obviously come from some alien planet and have never met an authentic human being or they are massively self-deluded. We humans may do nice things once in a while, but we didn’t climb down from the trees and take over the world by being nice. Not then, not now.
What helps us transcend our base nature is culture and self-control. Culture at its best helps us live to a standard of decency, helps us to cooperate with one another and to overcome our reptilian instincts. At its worse, it inspires just the opposite.
One of the things that makes this depressingly clear is a well-researched book by author David Grann titled: Killers of the Flower Moon. It tells the story of the Osage Indians in 1920s Oklahoma. It’s one of those books that you read and then several days later you’re driving down the street or shopping for groceries and you’re still thinking about it. It’s a good book, but it is disturbing.
When the federal government in the 1870s decided to relocate the Osage Indians to a designated barren area in northern Oklahoma, the Indians negotiated a deal to retain the mineral rights. The government wanted to wean the Osage from their traditional culture and introduce them to private ownership of property, so the area was divided into privately owned tracts among the members of the tribe. Children were forced to undergo education to teach them how to conduct themselves in a modern English-speaking society. And since Indians were still considered savages, the Indians’ financial decisions and investments were to be dictated by white trustees.
But then the Indians struck it rich. In the early 20th Century oil was discovered beneath their ground and soon the Osage tribal members constituted one of the richest societies on the planet.
Although by the 1920s America was a relatively modern society, in the interior Western states the frontier mentality was still very much alive. White trustees – prominent ranchers, merchants, attorneys, physicians, and other respectable folks – oversaw the Indian’s finances and wealth. The trustees, who were supposed to protect the naïve Indians from making stupid choices, instead stole from the Indians in big ways and small – overcharging for goods and services and sometimes cooking the books. They also conspired with young male relatives to romance and marry Indian women. Then one by one they would kill off the members of the family until the white husband would be the only heir to all the oil wealth.
The trustees were aided in this practice by local lawmen, who looked the other way, physicians who would supply drugs to slowly poison members of rich Indian families, and judges who always sided with prominent white men over Indians.
In the bloody history of the 20th Century, the killing of Indians in Osage County might be considered an ugly footnote. At the most, there were probably only a hundred or so Indians killed.
What happened to the Osage Indians in the 1920s obviously doesn’t compare with the genocide of Jews in Germany, the killing of Armenians by the Turks, the bloody purges of political dissidents in the Soviet Union under Stalin and in China under Mao, or the wide-spread killing of educated Cambodian people by the Khmer Rouge.
Two things make the tragedy of the Osage Indians different. One is that it happened in America. And two is that it was a community affair, with lots of people who either participated in plots to kill entire Indian families or knew what was going on and looked the other way.
The killing of Indians was finally broken up by the newly formed Federal Bureau of Investigation. A team of investigators led by former Texas Ranger Tom White, worked around the clock to unravel the murders despite bureaucratic interference from the FBI’s young boss, J. Edgar Hoover.
In the end, some ringleaders were tried for murder and imprisoned, but many of the murders went unsolved and most of the participants escaped punishment. The ugly history of that time remains a bitter memory among descendants of the victims.
The book is disturbing. Civilization should make us better than this, and usually it does. But sometimes, it merely helps us excuse such behavior.
Osage County in Oklahoma during the 1920s was one of those times.
Do you have a dissenting opinion or any opinion at all on the subject? Contact me at george@georgeleecunningham.com and let me know. Meanwhile, you can always subscribe and get an email reminder of blog postings. Your name will not be shared and you may cancel at any time.