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Show EDITORIAL: The High Cost Of Holidays As last Sunday's sun set, bring-, ing to a close the Fourth of July weekend, the nation audited the cost and found it was paying dearly for its holidays. The debit column listed 514 Americans who had died violently and in most cases needlessly while they celebrated cele-brated with the nation. In our lives, holidays have come to mean bargaining days with Death; days of pleasure suddenly turned to sadness because be-cause Death will not bargain. Exchanging violence and suffering suffer-ing for carelessness its terms are exacting and final. The National Safely Council has campaigned vigorously and expensively to instill a public consciousness of the hazards that are a part and parcel of every holiday. Yet over the July 4th weekend the accidental death toll of the nation reached its highest point since the pre-war era, with highway accidents accounting ac-counting for two-thirds of the three day holiday fatalities. In the face of proof that traffic traf-fic accidents generally are avoidable avoid-able this seems incredible. But dead men, women and children furnish mute evidence that highways, high-ways, holidays and carelessness form a combination to be reckoned reckon-ed with in the lives of people. What can be done to decrease this national loss? What indeed but to heed the warnings of men who have studied accidents as a scientist might study a slide under un-der his. microscope. The findings of the men who have made the causes of accidental death their professional undertakings, have reduced these causes to a common com-mon denominator human carelessness. care-lessness. And it is against carelessness care-lessness that they sound their warnings. Carelessness is a human failing, fail-ing, requiring less thought than caution, and men during their moments of relaxation are inclined in-clined to follow this line of least resistance. The consequences speak for themselves in the growing accidental death toll. Unfortunately it is impossible to legislate against indiscretion. Flagrant violations of the traffic, laws, laws which put men on their own during the moments when they are most apt to become be-come lax, show well that as long as people disregard the simple rules of safety there will be accidents ac-cidents which all the laws of a nation cannot prevent. |