I have a few quick updates that may seem incongruous to the fairly somber reflection that follows them.
I’m teaching a class on Academic Writing for the Public, to begin May 22. The class will be online and asynchronous, running for five weeks. If you are a professor, postdoc, grad student, or Ph.D. who works outside academia, and if you want to bring your ideas to audiences beyond academia, this class is for you. More info and registration is here. If the class fills up, join the wait list; I may be able to expand the class or offer it again later. Reply to this message if you have questions.
My speaking schedule for the fall is starting to fill. If you’d like me to come give a talk or workshop — on burnout, for example — to your university, company, religious organization, etc., please get in touch.
The Portuguese edition of The End of Burnout has just been published! Look for O Fim do Burnout in bookstores next time you’re in Rio de Janeiro, or just look for it at the publisher’s website. I’ve really enjoyed scrolling through Editora Vozes’s other titles, including household-name books in philosophy, theology, and social theory. I’m honored to know my book is in such company!
Now for a different topic.
On a clear morning a couple weeks ago, I went for a bike ride around a lake near my house. I pedaled along the east side of the water and saw police tape stretched across the trail, and police cars and fire trucks blocking the road that runs parallel to the shore. A few other cyclists and a photographer were standing at the taped-off perimeter watching as two men wearing black scrubs hauled a blue bag onto a stretcher. Parked next to them was a van from a local teaching hospital’s willed body program. I looked closer and saw metal wreckage further down, almost totally unrecognizable as having once been a vehicle.
As I later learned, it was a single-car crash with one fatality and no other injuries. The driver was named Roger Gonzalez. He was 19 years old.
I don’t know why Gonzalez went off the road at what must have been a very high speed. It’s tempting to suppose that he was distracted by his phone, as so many people seem to be when they’re driving. That stretch of road has been the site of many serious crashes, some fatal. It’s a six-lane state highway with few traffic lights and no guardrails, running right next to a popular recreation area.
Later that afternoon, I was standing at an intersection, waiting to cross the street. The light changed, and I knew to pause a beat before crossing. As the light turned red, a motorcycle zoomed past. Its rider then went up on one wheel, tearing down the street. A second later, an SUV also barreled through the red light.
I crossed the street and thought that the motorcycle-rider was someone who didn’t value his own life, who believed it wouldn’t be a big deal if he died. I thought that the SUV driver didn’t value other people’s lives. And I thought about the many other signs that life, even one’s own, doesn’t seem to be worth as much in the U.S. today as it did even a few years ago.
Life expectancy in the U.S. was declining even before Covid, and while lifespans in most countries are again on an upward trend, ours continues to decline. One of the biggest reasons is that young people keep dying violent deaths. I was shocked recently to learn that one in 25 U.S. five-year-olds will not live to be 40. As John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times put it, that’s one kid in every kindgerten class in the country being buried by their parents.
Americans are shooting children to death at an unprecedented rate. The number of U.S. children and teens killed with a firearm rose by 50% between 2019 and 2021. As alarmingly prevalent as school shootings are, they do not account for this rise. Twenty people were killed in school shootings in 2019; in 2021, 16 were. The people killing kids are their parents, relatives, neighbors, and friends. Kids and adults are also killing themselves at increasing rates.
Last week, a man in Texas, drunk and firing off rounds in his yard, was asked by his neighbor to please stop shooting. He didn’t stop. In fact, he went into the home of the man who asked him to stop and shot five people to death. The victims’ ages were 31, 25, 21, 18, and 8.
Where I live, in Dallas, the incidence of most violent crime is down this year. But murders are up by 23% over the previous year. Overdose deaths in my county are below the national average of 14 per 100,000 population, thank God. In the Pennsylvania county where I lived for eleven years, the rate is 23 per 100,000. And of course, there is the disturbing frequency of mass shootings. People have grievances with other people at home, work, school, church, and in response, they kill as many people as possible.
Americans at every income level die about five years earlier on average than our English cousins do. By and large, the richer you are, the longer you can expect to live. The U.S. is much richer than England, but the average American’s life expectancy is about the same as that of someone living in Blackpool, England’s poorest city.
I’m hardly the first person to observe that life has become cheap in America. As Clive Irving wrote last year in The Daily Beast, the low value on life is the true “American exceptionalism.” In other wealthy countries, people think life is worth living, that it’s a big deal if you or your neighbor or a random person on the street dies. Here, we don’t.
Irving notes that gun-makers and pharmaceutical companies profit from the means of mass death, suggesting that the problem is American campitalism: Our lives are short so others can be rich. But that doesn’t explain the recent rise in traffic fatalities. Or the fact that we’ve reached a 40-year high in the rate of pedestrian deaths.
While I do think there are policies that, if implemented, could save lives, the problem seems to have a strong pre-political element to it. Even while we try to change policies related to guns, for instance, we also somehow need to convince each other to value life for its own sake.
Two days after I saw the body bag loaded into the van, I rode my bike past the crash site. Flowers and photos and candles had been placed at the base of the large tree the driver had crashed into. Facing this memorial, a boy of about ten sat on the ground, hanging his head in apparent sorrow. Roger Gonzalez’s life certainly mattered to someone.