On Monday morning (January 6), a car swerved, hit, and destroyed a utility pole, crashed through a wooden fence, tore through a yard, and finally smashed into and exploded in a two story house near the corner of 44th Avenue West and 220th Street SW in Mountlake Terrace. A person in the car died, and one of the occupants of the burning house was taken to the hospital for treatment. Across the street from the damage and flames was the Seattle Meditation Center.
There will be two ways to read this incident. One, the driver was under the influence, and therefore, the driver is entirely to blame; two, the driver was sober, and so it was just a bit of bad luck for all involved. What is missing from these readings is any serious consideration of the real evil: high speed.
A car that caused as much damage as that car did to that Mountlake Terrace house was not, we can be sure, moving at the speed limit which, on that section of the street, was 25 miles per hour (it’s 20 mph a little further down the road, due to the presence of a school). And what is speed, exactly? It is the packing of energy into one point by the reciprocal conversion of decreased space into increased motion. What this means is that when a distance, considered as a field of resistance to motion (this is why walking or running subtracts from stored energy), is shortened by increased speed, that shortened distance is packed into the point of the car. And when the car hits something, the compressed distance—plus the fuel, plus the energy contained in metal, rubber, and plastic—is spectacularly released. This is a lot of deadly power.
Yet, in our culture, we often see speed as merely a game of cat and mouse. The police are cats and drivers are mice. Both have the same rights. One has the right to stop a fast car and issue a ticket; the other has the right (to an extent) to outwit the police.
You can speed, but you cannot drive drunk. But if you think about it for a moment, what is wrong with drunk driving at or below the speed limit, if it’s 20 mph? A city of slow-driving drunks does not sound half bad. What’s far more dangerous is a sober person speeding and under the impression that their speed is nothing more than a game of cat and mouse. What the demonization of drunk driving in our society reveals is its deep Christian moralism. The common feelings about fast driving do not have the Satanic intensity that we find with drunk driving.
A pastor’s reputation will be considerably hurt if he is caught wasted behind the wheel, but not if he is sober and caught by a cop with a speed gun. Indeed, the pastor can even include the experience in a Sunday sermon for a few laughs from the pews. Breaking the speed limit is not bad, even if the sober person hits a house or a store or a person.
