Back in the 50s and 60s, automobiles became both more accessible and faster without improving safety at all. By 1965, there were about 50,000 road deaths a year in the US, which then had a population of just under 200M.

This was enough that a significant proportion of the population had either known someone who died or had known someone who knew someone who died in an automobile accident, and people were getting tired of it.

When Unsafe at any Speed came out, it was an indictment not just of the culture but also of the auto industry, for lacking any care at all about safety and instead chasing profit.

In the wake of that, we eventually regulated the industry to make auto safety more of a priority. Laws were created or strengthened to set speed limits and govern driver behavior. And safety campaigns around seatbelts were and still are common.

While we, as a society, did, and still do, scold individual behavior—lack of seatbelt, drunk driving, excess speed—that wasn’t the only thing we did. We demanded action from the government and corporations.

400,000 people are dead of COVID in a year and every single person has experienced hardship from it. People are tired.

Like with auto fatalities, nearly everyone knows someone or knows someone who knows someone who died.

And yet, we have largely decided to address this problem through individual action.

Even the executive orders recently signed are still geared towards individual action (100 day mask challenge??)

Ignoring corporations is a massive mistake. We have buildings full of people, still. Shops full of people. Restaurants full of people.

This is absurd.

The vaccine rollout is a joke, there’s no meaningful effort to legislate solutions, PPE is still inexplicably hard to obtain after a year and everyone is broke.

We don’t fix this until we decide to hold corporations accountable. Sorry. We can yell at people all we want about keeping their nose in and it’s gonna have exactly the same effect as yelling at someone in 1964 to slow down