A tragedy of immense proportions

I can only imagine the pain that the family of Kylie Pinheiro (pictured) is going through today as they bury the 18-year-old college student who was killed in a car accident last week. I can only imagine because I do not have any kids, though I have numerous nieces and nephews — including three of driving age — and I can’t fathom how my siblings and their spouses or my wife’s siblings and their spouses might deal with a tragedy of this magnitude.

I am not a big user of the word tragedy, as a general rule. I tend to limit its use to the Aristotlian use, tied to Greek drama and the notion that the hero meets his end through his own imperfections.

But the horrific nature of what has happened here, the unnecessary loss of life, the too-soon ending that could have been prevented.

The driver of the car that struck the one in which Kylie was traveling — Kimberly Green, 32, of Somerset — has been charged with aggravated manslaughter and two counts of aggravated assault. Assistant Middlesex County Prosecutor Nicholas Sewitch says Ms. Green tested at a .159 blood-alcohol level — nearly twice the legal limit. She faces up to 30 years on the manslaughter charge and up to 10 years each on the assault changes, if convicted.

Ms. Green, according to The Home News-Tribune, is a single mother of two, making this all the more tragic. She has pleaded not guilty.

The thing that strikes me about this is that it did not have to happen. The lives that been shattered by this — Kylie’s, her family and friends’, Ms. Green and her children’s, did not need to be shattered. Accidents like this never need to happen. We all should know better, as we say in our editorial this week.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

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Marginalizing the debate

In an otherwise interesting piece on the economic approaches being taken by Democratic candidates, David Leonhardt in The New York Times offers this example of how the national press acts as a limiting force in national politics:

Given the odds that the next five weeks will turn one of the two candidates into a presumptive presidential nominee, it’s worth thinking about these ideas while there is still a campaign going on.

He’s talking about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, of course, ignoring that John Edwards has been running neck and neck in Iowa. True, Clinton and Obama have the money and the national support, but the votes have yet to be cast and Edwards has run a spirited campaign.

This reminds me of something Glenn Greenwald wrote a few weeks back, which I blogged on at the time. He was writing about the war, but his analysis could easily apply to the economy or to the mainstream wisdom on the primaries:

Anyone who disrupts Beltway harmony in order to hold the Bush administration accountable — anyone who seems actually bothered by the rampant lawbreaking — is thus easily dismissed as an annoying radical or a self-promoting fraud.

Basically, Beltway coverage is a self-fulfilling prophesy. If you marginalize Edwards — or Dodd or Richardson or Kucinich (who was missing from the Times’ chart on the candidates’ positions over the weekend — the full chart is available online) — you limit their ability to get their messages out, pushing them to the margins, which then justifies the press’ marginalization of them in the first place.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

E-mail me by clicking here.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.