Here's an old post I actually forgot to publish, which I discovered while preparing a post on the US beef issue. It was originally saved on 12/25/06 at 4:33 PM, which is more of a note for me than anything useful to you. But enjoy the post, and hopefully it will provide you with more ammunition to convince your Korean friends to use their seatbelts. Basically, my logic is this -- if you're not using your seatbelt in Korea, you might as well enjoy your life more and stop using condoms, since your likelihood of being killed or seriously injured in a car here is probably higher than you being "killed or seriously injured" by having sex here.
If you're gonna live by a roll of the dice, that is. You gonna use that seatbelt now?
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I want to start off this post by saying that I wear my seatbelt.
Well, as much as I can, considering the fact that many taxi drivers stuff the rear seatbelt locks down under the seat, or actually take the latch by force and place it above the plastic guard, where it sits, unable to be drawn down to the seatbelt lock, useless.
Half the time I do use the seatbelt, the taxi driver laughs and says, "You don't need to do that in the back." Oh, really?
"This is Michael. Today, he's going to hit his girlfriend so hard,
she's going to end up with permanent brain damage."
When I bring up the fact that I, as a 113 kg man, would become a human missile and likely kill whomever is in the front seats, or actually that anyone not strapped down in a serious accident would become like a billiard ball, careening all throughout the car, severely injuring or killing whomever he or she hit, I am suddenly the 분위기 킬러. But I'd rather be a mood killer than an actual one.
Did you ever think that by not using a seatbelt, it's not actually you you're killing, but the other people in the car, perhaps even someone you love? In an accident, there's no front or back seat – it's just whatever isn't strapped down. Killing someone else is a pretty tall price to pay for you being lazy. Pretty selfish, huh?
Korea is #1 among OECD countries (hat tip to Fence Rider, whom I saw come in through my server logs) in not only traffic accidents, but in fatalities from traffic accident fatalities. I've been saying this since 1994, when this fact was also true, and Korean people generally thought I was making that up. But it's been true for a long time, but surprisingly, public awareness of the consequences of simple things such as not wearing seat belts in the most dangerous country in the world to drive in, simply hasn't changed much.
Now, this statistic means that there aren't just more little fender-benders that artificially boost the statistics, as Koreans who hear me say this like to counter (albeit with no information or context other than simply not wanting to believe the statistic), but that those accidents also produce the most number of deaths out of all OECD countries surveyed.
Simply put, the statistics back up what simple observation and common sense should have already told you – Koreans taken as a whole routinely ignore traffic laws, city governments haven't done enough to protect pedestrians from motor vehicles and guarantee their safety, and public awareness about the importance of such things as wearing your seat belts, observing traffic signals, or yielding to pedestrians is abysmal.
And instead of turning into a nationalist feeding frenzy over who gets to roast the USFK – the death of the two middle school girls and the public reaction to it are a prime example of why all countries in the world (yes, including South Korea) try members of their own militaries internally and why diplomats enjoy immunity while working in host nations – what should have happened was a conversation over the fact that 490 children died from traffic accidents in 1999. Do the math – that's 1.3 kids per day.
Put into the math of reality, that's 13 kids every 10 days, or about 9 kids per week.
"Under what circumstances do people die from traffic mishaps? Listen to a representative from the Korean government give the number one reason:
'South Koreans jaywalk more than other OECD members, as the nation has insufficient facilities to prevent people from jaywalking and secure their safety, such as median strips or guardrails,' Lee pointed out.
'In advanced countries, the number of collisions between vehicles is larger than that of accidents between vehicles and pedestrians. But in Korea, about 40.2 percent of the total accidents were cases of vehicles hitting pedestrians,' Lee Eui-yong, an employee of the authority, said."
Simply put, there aren't enough sidewalks, guardrails, and ways to ensure pedestrian safety on the roads.
So, whatever one's political agenda, the reality of the circumstances surrounding the deaths of those two middle school girls is the same reality that results in the unfortunate death of 9 children per week, and even more adults. What is striking about the 2002 accident is how everyday and normal it is for children to die of traffic accidents – the only reason the nation shouts the names of those two unfortunate victims is because they became the center of a political firestorm.
If you saw the road where there accident took place, you would gasp. It's what would be considered in the United States a "state route," technically a highway. There is no sidewalk, and the road curves up around a bend where the girls were killed, so visibility is even further reduced.
The point is that no pedestrians should be walking there, and I think that perhaps military or large vehicles shouldn't be driving there if pedestrians are, in reality there. The way I saw it, and the way I heard it described from people who've actually seen the details of the case as well as the accident site itself, it was an accident waiting to happen. Well, more accurately, as in many places in Korea, it's many accidents happening all the time.
In the call for those two soldiers heads (whom I feel were guilty of no murder, but rather a traffic accident due to no demonstrated negligence), in the call for amending the SOFA, in the call for the removal of the US military from the Korean peninsula, in invoking the materially irrelevant cases of actual military crimes committed by US personnel here or in other places in the world, what has remained completely and utterly unchanged were – drum roll, please:
The actual circumstances that led to those middle school girls' deaths.
Simply put, if there had been a sidewalk there, those girls would still be alive today.
What makes this ironic and unfortunate for the Korean peninsula is the fact that children are getting run over daily here, and nothing is being done to change the circumstances that lead to the high number of children being killed here. That road remains as is, unchanged, for all the many who yelled Miseon and Hyosun's names and were apparently shocked at their deaths.
What is sickening to me – an American, yes, but a man who started out his experience in the Korean countryside teaching in a middle school for two years – is that the nation wasn't protesting or even apparently angry (aside from people from the local community near where the two girls died) when the two girls actually died; it was only when the politicized trial and its outcome was an apparent insult to the nation that it became an issue.
For a clear thinker, and for those interested in justice and solutions – not scapegoats and emotional salves – the entire thing was a farce.
Proof of that was an American jeep being driven while on official duty killed an ajumma in another traffic accident sometime in November, when the protests were rising into a fever pitch. Why didn't the Korean media report it? Why don't Koreans still not know about that to this day?
The driver was a KATUSA, a Korean national.
Had that driver happened to have been an American soldier, same accident, same victim? It would have been a further media frenzy. In the end, people were concerned about politics, not the actual lives of anyone involved.
I'm not speaking as a nationalist, as an American, as George Bush's appointed representative – which unfortunately, many Korean folks assume me to be if I speak outside of the "conventional wisdom" around this incident. For you see, if there is anything remarkable about this case, it is how unremarkable it is, at how predictable and preventable their deaths were, and how sad and telling it is that nothing has changed.
Instead of placing the heads of two scapegoats on the chopping block because of Korea's changing set of relations with the United States vis a vis Korea's increasing sense of national pride and desire to be independent its former "big brother" – which is really what that incident was all about – if people in this country, foreign or non, care about the lives of others in relation to their cars, they would stop killing children and other pedestrians in small strokes.
If Korean nationalists really care about the lives of those two middle school girls – and the 9 more children who die every week in this country, but for whom the drivers don't happen to be American soldiers – then they would buckle their seat belts, stop at crosswalks, and slow the heck down in school zones.
Yes, school children die in other countries because of traffic accidents, too. But in a country that has national protests that allegedly concern themselves with the deaths of just two of them, but then doesn't do anything to actually change the material circumstances of their deaths while a nationalist witch hunt is led in their names, and where the traffic accident and traffic accident death rates are the highest in the developed world – this indignation and anger seem a little misplaced.
In the end, American armored cars aren't killing the majority of children every year in Korea. Bad drivers and lack or proper city planning do. Nationalists and others who want to save Korean children – let's do this for the children, let's make a new resolution for the new year:
- Stop at all traffic signals.
- Stop at all crosswalks.
- Obey the speed limit on roads with pedestrians.
- Don't assume that pedestrians will yield because you honk your horn. They might not have heard you. (The two middle school girls were listening to an MP3 player when they were hit, which is another convenient fact omitted from Korean media reports, because it was an inconvenient fact).
- Stop cursing because you're late and realize you are driving a multi-ton, potential instrument of death. Your car is not a toy.
- Use your seat belts.
- Taxi drivers, stop disabling the rear seat belts. You actually want to prevent me from choosing not to die?
This will do more to save Korean children and pedestrians than any other measure. Changing the SOFA or putting two American soldiers 1) would not have brought the two girls back, not 2) would it have prevented any further people from dying on that road.
Installing a guard rail and sidewalk would have and will do both.
So everyone who was angry, upset, or shivered in the cold during a candlelight vigil in 2002/2003 – you're going to follow all the above rules, right?
For the sake of the children?
