About an hour south east of where I live, Michigan had a 193 car pile-up on I-94. Here's some video footage of that horrible crash:
By the way it's a disturbing video.
One person died and 22 were injured.
I was on the highway that day. The roads were icy, the wind blowing powdery snow into white-out conditions...you couldn't see more than a dozen feet in front of your car at times. I was driving 30 MPH on a 70 MPH highway. Everybody else was driving the same. Some a little bit faster some a little bit slower.
It didn't matter what speed folks were driving yesterday. Nobody would have been able to see the wall of cars piled up until it was too late no matter how fast they were going.
Here's the point...in the comment threads on Facebook, on the news sites, everywhere, folks are suggesting the 193 drivers in this enormous wreck screwed up by driving too fast or driving at all.
We have a bottomless capacity to look at tragic misfortune and say "that's because they were idiots".
Out of the hundreds of thousands of people driving - out of every driver who ever found themselves driving in lousy conditions -- and don't pretend it's never happened to you, because it has -- when folks actually meet with misfortune we look to find comfort in why those who met with misfortune deserved it.
I'm consistently astonished at our capacity to blame the victims. I'm consistently astonished at our capacity to jam our own heads into the sand and make ourselves believe that if we do everything right, nothing awful will happen to us. And when something happens to others, they've done something wrong.
Sometimes shit happens in life. And there's nothing you could have done about it. Cars are deadly. They're among the deadliest things in America. Everybody who gets into a car any day of the week in any weather is taking his or her life into their hands. If you want to pretend otherwise, you're living in a special kind of denial. You don't have total control.