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Are we all going through life moving in the wrong direction?

In June 2009, a car crash on I-70 near Fort Morgan, in northeast Colorado, left a person dead. The accident happened when an immigrant from Somalia drove in the wrong direction and crashed into a car going in the right direction.

The accident and its fatal consequences immediately created a wave of petitions at the local level and statewide to limit the arrival of African immigrants and people from other countries because “they don’t share our culture and they don’t know our laws, not even our traffic laws.”

For several weeks, readers sent letters to newspapers complaining about how unsafe they felt driving on the highways due to the presence of immigrant drivers who “don’t even know which side of the highway they should be on.”

Fort Morgan authorities then created a program to teach English and driving skills to immigrants, to facilitate their integration into society.

A year later, on July 6, 2010, a White woman, apparently under the effects of alcohol, entered I-25 near Denver in the wrong direction and caused an accident where a person died.

The driver was not an African immigrant and the accident didn’t happen in a rural area. Quite the opposite, the woman earned two college degrees in Colorado and she was driving just north of Denver.

Perhaps for that reason, or perhaps because the suspect is a blonde person, there were no requests of actions or sanctions to the level seen a year earlier in Fort Morgan.

Then, on July 15, 2010, just last week, the driver of a Regional Transportation District (RTD) bus drove his bus, passengers included, going north several miles on the southbound lanes. Fortunately, there was no accident in this case.

A few days later, the driver resigned from his job, but he will face no charges because no police officers saw him going the wrong way. In addition, RTD only said the case will be investigated to see if there is a need to modify how bus drivers are trained.

Could it be possible that now we have to teach bus drivers they need to drive in the right side of the road? Whatever the case, because there was no accident or charges, nobody asked for the deportation of all bus drivers or for the closing of all interstate highways.

It seems that if an immigrant drives the wrong way, that’s a crime. If a White, college-educated woman does it, it is a tragic accident. If a professional driver does it, it is just an inconsequential oversight.

What are all these drivers going in the wrong direction trying to teach us? What is being revealed by the attitude of the public toward those incidents and accidents?  What if traffic laws are no longer as important as they used to be? What other laws are becoming less and less important?

And how can we be sure that if everybody is going in the same direction in life that doesn’t mean they are all going in the wrong direction?

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