Roadside crosses and flowered wreaths marking youthful traffic accidents are vying for roadside space with billboards. Parents clap their hands to their head in disbelief, and highway administrators scratch their wooden heads over these accidents, but once the emergency dust and excitement settles the problem still remains: U.S. roads are filled with incompetent drivers holding unearned licenses zooming about a dangerous and lawless road infrastructure.

Incompetent drivers by their unpredictable and excitable nature should be summarily weeded out by the driver's license test.  Accident statistics tell otherwise and simple observations show a pandemonium of teenagers zooming around in cars with enlarged muffler exhaust openings, shuttling the gas pedal and brake back and forth to the throbbing noise of Britney Spears or 50 cent. The automobile handbook's wisdom of concentrating on your driving is unfortunately drowned out by the teen mind obsessed with the 'images' and 'styles' of the latest Hollywood singing sensations.

Apply drugs, alcohol, cell phone conversations, or another rap album cd to the agitated teen mind and we are presented with a significant portion of our current roadway driving mess. Granted, the public schools don't help the confusion of teenagers, but shouldn't the driver's examination test? No, answering a few multiple choice questions, halting at a stop sign, and flicking a blinker on is about all we ask of our dumbest generation in securing a driver's license.

Then, it's off to the raceways for them after first stopping off at the music store for some more self-loathing music. There is even a web site, sttop.net, for reporting dangerous teen drivers in California. You can also read some sobering statistics concerning our dumbest generation behind the wheel at smartmotorist.com.

Plenty of non-teen drivers are part of the problem as well. The hysteria of getting from point A to Point B consumes us all and motivates us to speed excessively, tail-gate, brake-slam, and carry on animated conversations with other drivers and ourselves. Certainly, the window view does not afford a pleasant view with all of its mindless blacktop, billboards, lube joints, and quickie-marts.

In response, numerous motorists express their displeasure at such an offending view by hurling their cigarettes out the window, or simply throwing all of the day's accumulated trash out at high speed. Cigarette butts dancing and bouncing along the expressway while erupting in a shower of sparks are almost like 4th of July fireworks and a reminder of our freedom to do whatever we want.

Then we have the massive road infrastructure itself supporting an overabundance of cars and increased accident risk. Here it can be said that if you aren't on this blacktop highway of destinations driving something, whether it be the newest marketed automobile or at least a jalopy, then something is definitely wrong with you. You must be homeless, unemployed, or aimlessly bobbing about with the dregs of society.

Or perhaps by walking instead of driving you want to be reminded of your self-sufficiency, to hear a bird or two over the diesel semi downshifting, or to engage in pleasant conversation with a person passing by. The logical alternative to everyone driving a car—public transit, walking, or biking, is severely underutilized in the U.S. The desire for many people to individually drive further congests our roads causing newer constructed roads to be eventually congested and unsafe.

Many road designs are poor, contributing to driver excesses and increased accidents. For example, where roads coexist with pedestrians, road width is very important. Wider roads encourage drivers to speed and narrower roads with roadside parking slow the flow of traffic. Some newer housing developments pride themselves on smooth wide empty roads around and within areas where pedestrians frequent. However, the wider road takes the human being longer to cross and at the mercy of cars tending to go faster.

Cars and pedestrians are out of sync and at odds with one another, and cars in strife with themselves,  leading to a significantly increased risk of auto and pedestrian accidents. Our roads are getting fatter along with our dumbest generation's flabbiness. It is time to put our roads on a diet. In favor of more pedestrian oriented roadway design is Walkable Communities, Inc. who believes that "walkability is the cornerstone and key to an urban area's efficient ground transportation." (walkable.org)

Even the police stand incompetently by, hogtied by government bureaucracy, unwilling to ticket speeders and unable to arrest those drivers who blow below the minimum alcohol percentage and still get away with drinking and driving. Speed limits on most major highways are just a suggestion, allowing our emotionally unstable populace to determine their own driving speed. Driving fifteen miles over the speed limit has become acceptable on many highways throughout the U.S.

There are common sense solutions to the driving crisis. For starters, the U.S. government should declare a requirement that all law enforcement agencies will enforce the speed limit law with a 5 mile per hour buffer.

The widespread abuse of alcohol among drivers should also be met with swift enforcement, but the alcohol lobbying interests often find a champion in the government for alcohol drinking rights. To have a more properly functioning society that doesn't cater to easily avoidable human losses, only the alcohol equivalent of 1/3 or less of a beer should be allowed for drivers. But with America's fix on alcoholic abuse reaching greater heights of glorification, as in moderndrunkardmagazine.com, it remains to be seen if our legal means to drown our sorrows and then drive will be curtailed in the least.

Roadside flower memorials are a testament to people's lives being haphazardly and prematurely ripped away. For those at immediate fault for the accident, it points to the incompetence of their parents, public education and government, all of whom lend a discouraging hand to the highway war-zone confusion.

Furthering the tragedy of youthful traffic deaths is when the death experience becomes for the victim's peers just another part of their teen soap opera of ’style’ and ‘images” and ‘feelings’. So after the death ‘feelings’ wear off the exasperating children only go on to more drugs, drinking, sex, driving, and death—more confusion and a precursor to another roadside grave.

* Note: Above picture of cross and flowers commemorating Chris Durden. God bless him.

We don't need more cars on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, we need public transit! Another Bay Bridge will mean not only more traffic but more urban sprawl since bad development ensures further bad development. Public transit development, on the other hand, encourages city growth around an efficient central structure and lessens the marred and anti-social landscapes of car dependency.

Why doesn't the Eastern Shore have any significant public transportation like a rail transit system? (*) Because we wouldn't have enough paying people to justify the cost? This is partly true because most people are already locked into an automobile orientation. Also true is the history that led up to the apparent cost justification problems of building rail transit.

For example, decades ago a corrupt plan was put into action by some automobile and oil companies to minimize public rail transit in favor of cars, trucks, and buses, called the General Motors streetcar conspiracy. With the U.S. government essentially run by big business and pro-auto lobbying interests, public transit development has been going downhill ever since. (answers.com)

Having a few buses or shuttles milling about the Eastern Shore of Maryland just isn't effective for current population levels. What we need is a rail line that connects with the Washington/Baltimore rail lines, bridges over or under the Chesapeake Bay, runs through Easton, Cambridge, Salisbury, and over to Ocean City. Too expensive you say? Sure it would be expensive, but only because the wrong infrastructure was built in the first place.

The original Bay Bridge design should have included a rail carrying underbelly instead of designed exclusively for cars. And if that was not possible then a tunnel should have been built. The public transit infrastructure should have been planned and built between the 1940's and 60's. Instead, massive amounts of money were spent on highways crisscrossing every square inch of America, blighting the landscape and eviscerating communities.

The trillions that have been doled out over the past decades on automobile infrastructure is staggering, and the resultant pollution, traffic jams, and environmental destruction continues at an unabated pace.

The federal transportation bill, called the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century, appropriates over $217 billion, but it spends five times as much on highways as on public transportation. A single track of rail moves as many people as a six lane highway during rush hour. For every $5 that is spent on highways, only $1 is spent on public transit…. (sierraclub.org)

Trucks are part of the problem too. Long haul trucking is massively inefficient compared to freight rail transport and the average highway carries hundreds of semi's barreling along contributing to congestion, pollution, and safety problems. While trucking within cities and connecting between nearby cities is necessary, a proliferation of long distance trucking in place of freight rail transportation simply doesn't make sense.

Is public transit the only way in which people should be able to move long distances? No, but it should serve as a transportation option between longer unwalkable distances. Cars should be largely subservient to public transit, so that the predominance of going to work or shopping from home is satisfied by transit and especially walking, and special occasions are satisfied by car.

Cities and towns (where most people live) should be planned according to a predominance of public transit, but more rural areas would highly utilize the automobile. Still, if supported by the community, rural transit routes and communal sharing are easily realized.

Many countries in Europe have an effective public transit system. Sweden, for example, has a quite efficient transportation system. Sweden also has one of the highest levels of automobile ownership within Europe. The difference between Sweden and the U.S. is that most Swedes don't have to drive their cars everywhere, they use available public transit for a high percentage of their daily trip distances. The public transit option is there so they use it, and their high standard of living allowing them to purchase a car gives them another transportation option.

On the Eastern Shore of Maryland there is no predominance of transit, so we are presented with only one option: You have to have a car and use it for all distances traveled. Basing future development plans such as an additional Chesapeake bridge on the further glorification of car dependency is poor reasoning. Eastern Shore residents and the millions of tourists that visit the beach should be presented with a more efficient and comfortable way to travel—rail transit.

(*) This question was originally posed by the great thinker and educationalist Christopher Callaghan.

Aid to Africa? How about encouraging African countries to be more self-sufficient and encouraging their women to have no more than two children and zero children if they lack the means to raise them?

Just throwing wads of cash and food bags around never ultimately helped anyone but it does make you and them feel better and then… Oops! there comes another hungry kid so here comes another wad of money and a bag of rice. 

Are human beings just stomachs with uncontrollable sexual urges? Without a higher plan of humanity, this is exactly how aid givers perceive the African people.

Money or food given without a higher plan than basic human needs is ripe for disaster. It has recently come to light that Nigerian leaders since 1960 stole or misused an estimated £220 billion, "as much as all the western aid given to Africa in almost four decades." (africanexecutive.com)

"For God's Sake, Please Stop the Aid!" says Kenyan economics expert James Shikwati.

Huge bureaucracies are financed (with the aid money), corruption and complacency are promoted, Africans are taught to be beggars and not to be independent. In addition, development aid weakens the local markets everywhere and dampens the spirit of entrepreneurship that we so desperately need. (projectrwanda.org)

Do you know where your prescription medicine really comes from and what it is really doing to you? Of course you don't, because for most of you, pills are a way to justify your physical sicknesses and poor mental conditions that would otherwise have been cured by living a healthy lifestyle.

Drug companies and doctors prey on this weakness of yours by treating your symptoms and not the cause. Drugs are beneficial in some cases but should be prescribed only to stabilize a patient as part of an overall effort to require the patient to live a healthy lifestyle.

Drug companies playing the part of the drug pusher and not the healer has transformed them into a profit making machine. These hard selling pharmaceutical companies' many corruptions can be read in former editor-in-chief of The New England Journal of Medicine Dr. Marcia Angell's book The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It.

Even the quality of drugs is suspect in this lucrative industry:

Stolen, compromised, and counterfeit medicine increasingly makes its way into a poorly regulated distribution system, where it reaches unsuspecting patients who stake their lives on its effectiveness. Tragically, we cannot trust the purity of the costly drugs supplied by our most reputable drugstore and hospital pharmacies…. (dangerousdoses.com)

Jeff Rense describes America's youth all too well in this incredibly insightful summation:

We have, indeed, essentially lost most of the next generation. The causes are more than obvious:

The government schools with brainwashing, stultifying, revisionist PC curriculums and staffed with ever-less capable teachers reformatted to create non-reading, non-thinking, nearly non-verbal morons;

The devastating cradle-to-grave mind control of commercial TV - the most withering weapon ever unleashed on human kind; The unlimited sex and reflexive violence and immorality conveyed and marketed in many/most films and 'pop culture' media;

Hideously ugly 'people' magazines purveying…nearly demanding…attention and obedience to an endless stream of insipid 'cool' role models and the cheapest sensationalism;

The astonishing vapid, often vile, negative, self-pitying 'music' ingraining and reinforcing boundless hedonism, anger, rage, self-indulgence and the taking of ever more plentiful street drugs;

Countless millions of broken homes and miserably failed parents producing incompetent, virtually unteachable students; Ruthless school peer pressure and brutality…strong enough to push tragically betrayed and sold-out young people to mass murder and suicide;

The pharmaceutical cartel's medicating/destroying of millions of elementary and teenage children whose lives will never fully recover from their 'therapy';

A youth 'culture' dominated by image, wallowing in victim-hood, committed to non-responsibility, obsessed with sex and 'friends' and 'style' and headed toward a multitude of sexually-transmitted diseases, many fatal;

A national diet of the most worthless and criminally-contaminated disease-producing food in history; and much more.

America has been usurped, raped and destroyed by greed and by a group of people whose goal has been, for centuries, the subjugation and servitude of the human race. The 'next' generation will walk, mindlessly, fat, with many obese, and in poor health, through a droll, utterly predictable lifetime of the most unprecedented stupidity and self-gratification - and self-destruction - in modern history. (rense.com)

Then there is 16 year old Ashley Anderson's article: "America's Failing Public School System." (newswithviews.com)

We find also, the deliberate dumbing down of america, a classic book by

Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, former Senior Policy Advisor in the U.S. Department of Education, who blew the whistle in the `80s on government activities withheld from the public. Her inside knowledge will help you protect your children from controversial methods and programs. (deliberatedumbingdown.com)