EDITORIAL
Senseless tragedy may offer lessons

"Professional drivers on a closed course," it says on the bottom of the TV commercial for the hot car that performs four-wheel slides through cliff-side curves, outruns the rain, leaves the world in a blur.

What is it buried in our psyches that makes us think such a machine would provide an appropriate ride home from a bar at 4:15 in the morning via Ala Moana Boulevard?

Who among us is pure enough to assign blame for the tragic head-on collision early Monday morning that took the lives of two young men and sent three others to the hospital, one in critical condition? We know that when we point a finger at someone, there are three more fingers pointing back at us.

Still, what kind of a society are we if we let such an incident pass without learning from it?

The lion's share of responsibility, of course, falls squarely on the shoulders of the two inebriated young men in a speeding Honda that drifted out of control and ran head-on into an SUV. Do their friends who are memorializing them on the fatal street corner understand that, had they lived, the two would be facing serious prison time for their criminal behavior? It's nice to reflect on what nice kids they were, but what about their innocent victims?

Yet there's plenty of blame to go around here. We'd suggest it provides a study in deception, delusion and denial, at a number of levels.

Start, if you will, with a comparatively easy problem: the sale and possession of cars suitable for racing. We know, do we not, that a majority of people who own such cars use them in responsible ways, showing them off in car shows, tinkering on them in car clubs, racing them only in their dreams.

Few of us will stop to ask: What is the point of owning a racing machine if its capabilities can never be realized, given that street racing is insanely dangerous and illegal? Why do we permit them to be manufactured, sold and driven — no matter how slowly — on our streets?

We hear calls for a new law making speeding 35 mph or more over the limit subject to confiscation of the car. But we already know that racing on Ala Moana could kill us. If that thought doesn't deter us, why would the threat of losing the car be more effective?

The appeal of racing cars is deceptive (indeed, many will argue that Andrew Ngan's Honda wasn't technically a race car no matter how fast it was going). The notion that those who own them won't be tempted to abuse them at least once is delusional, and that's a problem that we as a society are in denial over.

A far more difficult problem is that of alcohol. Alcohol is an insidiously deceptive drug, telling those who use it that the more they imbibe, the less they've had. It's not only the abusers of alcohol who delude themselves as to its effects; it is impossible to believe that no one who knew Ngan and Ryan Kono failed to notice the beginnings of a drinking problem. And we are a society in denial over the dangers of bars that serve too much liquor to too many of their customers.

Deception, delusion and denial: The Monday-morning tragedy was not an isolated incident. We're all involved.