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No, it’s not a grocery store stock boy saying this as you walk past a spilled cart.

It’s Ambulance Driver at a drunk driving scene.

Context is everything.

Edwin Leap says the most important thing you will read today:

…The modern emergency department is a kind of social sciences laboratory.  In fact, about 30 years into the existence of the specialty of emergency medicine, I feel comfortable saying that we have shown.with remarkable precision that the more radical social revolutions of the 20th century were shameful, stunning failures.  And the reason I can say it is not based on carefully designed studies, or because I’ve observed it from the comfort of the ivory tower of academia, but because I, and many others like me, treat the casualties of those social revolutions day, after day, after day.  Some examples, you ask?

• Drug use is normal, good, relaxing and enlightening.
• Sex is natural and anyone who tries to limit sex is an old fashioned prude
• The way to fix poverty is to give services, food and money to them, so that they will feel compelled to improve themselves
• Families can be defined in any way, family integrity is over-rated and men are entirely unnecessary for a proper home!
• Religion is an impedance to modern thought, and we need to be liberated from it by the clear, crystal light of pure science.

The mantra of ‘free love’ that began in the 60’s wasn’t about liberation; it was about enslavement to the desires of those who started it and who wanted no restraint on their behavior.
…
Do you know why I see children who are anxious and afraid? Do you know why children seek each other out for sex, and have children of their own at such young ages? Because they are terrified. Why is that? They lack the peace of safe and stable families. They lack the boundaries and discipline, born of love, that proper families give. They want the protection, wisdom, affection of a man and woman, together for the long haul. Without those things, we see what we do in the ER; teen mothers, teen fathers, irresponsible parents shifting sexual alliances from week to week, month to month, moving in with lovers and moving away from them.

Read the whole thing. I excerpt here only the barest whiff of the rotting corpse he wants taken off life support.

As noted in comments there, ERs have a huge selection bias. Also, I believe there’s a big difference between condemning bad behavior socially, and punishing it with the law. Sure, drugs are bad, but the War on Drugs is even worse, because it deprives even the sober of their freedom.

Nevertheless, the attitudes Leap describes are real. My generation, the hippie generation, the peace and love and grooviness generation, is to blame, and we will go down in history as social traitors who destroyed, in only one or two generations, the richest, freest, most powerful nation that has ever been.

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I cannot resist adding: Obama and his party whole-heartedly embrace the attitudes and policies Leap excoriates. The eyes of Palin, her running mate, and their party leaders, are clouded by decades of socialist, feel-good pap, but they dimly perceive the truth (McCain, of course, survived years of the tender, loving instruction of Obama’s idols), and they are struggling, however weakly, to campaign on the twin pillars of liberty and duty.

Awhile back,  I linked to Ambulance Driver’s bad day, in which he has a motorcycle accident.

Today he put up the full story.

In essence, a driver made a left turn in front of him, despite his due-diligence efforts to announce his oncoming presence at the intersection. She wasn’t drunk, wasn’t using a cell phone, had a perfect driving record, “Up till now”, as AD says.

She just didn’t see him.

I’m going to emphasize: any of us, at any time, could do something like this. We see what we expect to see. Our brains basically mock up well over half of our visual field at any given instant. The vision system was not evolved to work at highway speeds. This time a motorcycle happened to be in a blind spot, but it could have been a pedestrian, or an SUV.

Friend Pat is a bike rider (she’s even been a racer).

And I’ll say it again: the things that make life worth living are the things that can also hurt us the most, even kill us. You want to talk about a serious risk of heartache, try having kids. I’m only an uncle, and nothing like this has happened to any of the kids in my life–but enough to know that if you want a pain-free life, don’t have kids, and don’t let anyone you know have kids.

Fuck that shit. Fuck that shit till its ears bleed.

Safety is an illusion.

Go out, live your life, do the things that give you joy. Sooner or later, though, no matter how careful you are, either you’ll make a mistake, someone else will, or sheer random chance will confound you. Even if you just lie in bed, quaking with fear, eventually your heart will blow out.

Live your life, and extract as much joy out of it as you can, doing whatever it takes.

I’m gonna be extra careful at intersections for a while, though.

Ambulance Driver gets banged up, then hears some bad news.

Read the story over at his place, but I want to highlight this:

For those of you well-meaning and not-so-well-meaning commenters who are tempted to use this as a platform to decry the inherent danger of motorcycles and ATVs, save it. I’m hurt, and upset, and not in the mood to read it, well-meant or not. I’m not going to stop riding.

“Life is pain. Anybody who tries to tell you anything else is selling something.”

The only things that make life worth living are the things that can cause us the most pain, or kill us outright.

AD’s one of the good guys in my book. He knows, more than most of us, what he’s doing and what the risks are.

For the next few days I’m gonna be watching out extra careful for those who do not ride around in cages.

Dammit, AD, this is the second time in just a few days. Please, please, please be careful.