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Utopian Turtletop. Monsieur Croche's Bête Noire. Contact: turtletop [at] hotmail [dot] com
Friday, November 02, 2007
Today I got an email from a friend urging me to vote for a local lefty activist for City Council. I had been planning to vote for her, but she got busted for drunk driving a few weeks ago, and I can’t do it.
Drunk driving should be a felony.
Drunk driving is no different than firing a pistol into a crowd.
One day when I was 19, I had taken the bus from Ann Arbor to Kalamazoo to visit my parents from college. I took the city bus from downtown to my neighborhood. When I got off the bus, a childhood friend of mine happened to be walking by, looking bewildered. “A drunk driver killed my mom. Driving down a 2-lane country road under a clear blue sky.”
For years afterwards, every time my friend spoke of his mom, he spoke of her in the present tense. Sometimes I tear up thinking about her death, and how her death affected my friend and his family. She was a wonderful person -- very cheerful, very kind, very smart, very firm. We had worked together on a volunteer project at church the summer before she died. I liked her immensely.
Some years later a good friend of my sister’s got into a car with a crowd of people, all of them drunk, age 18 or 19. They plowed into a tree and they all died. My sister's friend had played Tevya in the high school production of Fiddler on the Roof. She hasn't been able to watch the show since. He died 19 years ago.
My friend’s candidate would be good on the City Council. But she belongs in prison.
Afterthought: I must thank my friend for the email, because he brought my friend's mother to mind. And as horrible as her loss was, I am tearfully glad to remember her on the Day of the Dead. I have been missing my dad today too, and my grandparents and my grandpa's cousins whom I loved.
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