500,000 people worldwide . . .

. . . die each year in road accidents. Apparently this is an acceptable sacrifice for the freedom of the road.

"Two-thirds of these deaths involve pedestrians," says anti-car activist Jan Lundberg, "of which one-third are children. Just in the United States about forty-two thousand people die per year because of auto collisions, nearly as many as the total number of Americans killed in Vietnam. Everybody knows someone who has died or been seriously injured in a car crash, yet cars have insinuated themselves into our social life - and into our psyches - so thoroughly that we somehow accept these deaths as inevitable, or not shocking, as opposed to perceiving them for what they are: a direct and predictable result of choosing to base our economic and social systems on this particular piece of technology."

What's worse is that even more people die each year from respiratory illness stemming from auto-related toxins than die from traffic crashes.

"We have become slaves to these machines. If a group of aliens came to this planet and said they would bring us all sorts of goodies like jet skis, tomatoes in January, computers, and so on (or at least they would bring them to the richest of us), on the multiple conditions that we offer up to them a yearly sacrifice of a half-million human lives, change our planet's climate, individually spend increasing amounts of time serving them, and socially devote an ever-increasing amount of land and other resources to their service, we would rebel in a flash. Or at least I hope we would. But that's the reality we face."

-- For more . . . Jan Lundberg's website: Culture Change