Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1462122
maltatoday | SUNDAY • 20 MARCH 2022 OPINION 3 LETTERS & EDITORIAL maltatoday | SUNDAY • 20 MARCH 2022 Mikiel Galea Letters & Clarifications One road fatality is one too many FASTER commuting options is not a luxury but a fatal alternative as com- pared to a safe commute. Although Malta saw the sharpest decrease in traffic fatalities in the European Union during 2020, the figures of road acci- dents are bound to scare anyone using roadways for frequent travel. Road deaths are largely preventable. The strategies to reduce the carnage go under different names in different places, from Vision Zero to the Safe Systems Approach, but they are not really that distinct substantively. In any traffic accident, there may, at most, be involved six actors. The driver, the other driver, the vehicle, the other vehicle, the road, the environment. Other vehicles (and their drivers) may also have a role to play, even if they are not directly involved in the crash. Unlike walking, driving is a privilege, not a right. Road collisions and fatal- ities incur huge economic costs at a national level, which includes a burden on the health, insurance and legal sys- tems. Moreover, they can have negative social implications for the families of those involved as well as on local com- munities. Our safety advocacy sector should lay greater emphasis on the use of the 3 Es of Engineering, Enforcement, and Education to better promote and make more effective strategies. This should be extended with other Es, including variously Emergency Services, Evaluation, Environment, Encouragement, and Everyone Else. Like congestion and global warming, our road death toll can be significantly reduced, but there is little evidence that Malta is collectively interested in solving it. While there are obviously advocates, they do not have the upper hand, otherwise, deaths would not be rising in recent months off their 2020 lows. Dr Mark Said Msida 'Anger of God' A lecture on the 'anger of God' was advertised in the local media last Feb- ruary. This "divine" anger is depicted in all its ferocity and brutality in the Bible. Yahweh is a stern, warlike, "stiff- necked" deity who fights for his people as fiercely as the gods of the Iliad. "He commits or commands brutalities as repugnant to our taste as they were acceptable to the morals of the age. He slaughters whole nations with the naive pleasure of a Gulliver fighting for Lilliput" (Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage). Yahweh "is so ferocious that he thinks of destroying all the Jews for worshipping the Golden Calf. Moses has to argue with him that he should control himself, and 'to repent of this evil against thy people'. Never was there so thoroughly human a god." "The curses with which Yahweh threatens his chosen people if they disobey him are models of vitupera- tion, and inspired those who burned heretics in the Inquisition, or excom- municated Spinoza: 'Cursed shalt thou be in the city, and cursed shalt thou be in the field. Cursed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy land. Cursed shalt thou be when thou comest in, and cursed shalt thou be when thou goest out'." "He will punish children for the sins of their fathers, their grandfathers, even their great-great-grandfathers." "Because the Jews commit 'whore- dom' with the daughters of Moab he bids Moses: 'Take all the heads of the people, and hang them up before the Lord against the sun'. It is the morality of Ashurbanipal and Ashur" (Durant, Ibid). "Framing him jealous, fierce at first, we gave him justice as the ages rolled. Tricked by our own early dream and need of solace, we grew self-deceived. Our making soon our maker did we deem, and what we had imagined we believed." (Thomas Hardy, God's Fu- neral.) John Guillaumier St Julian's