Paul Thomas: Hellishness on our roads and around the world

Summer holidays are an opportunity to measure how our society functions where it really matters - on the open road.

Driving is the ultimate social activity, in that we put our safety in the hands of others. We rely on fellow road users to abide by the rules and behave in a responsible and rational manner, and we assume they value their lives as much as we value ours.

The stakes are higher on the open road because everyone's going twice as fast and, as we know, speed kills. As does stupidity.

We get constant grim reminders that there are people who don't care enough about others or perhaps themselves to behave co-operatively on the roads.

Thankfully in our case they were conspicuous by their absence - while covering well over 1000 km, we saw only one instance of a motorist placing his own and others' lives at risk through wilful recklessness.

However, the police campaign to make drivers stick to the 100km/h limit seems at best a limited success. Adhering to the limit means being overtaken or tailgated, a speciality of the antisocial driver.

The exceptions prove the rule. Most drivers are sensible, but there's always one or two who seem to think getting there 15 minutes earlier is a matter of life and death.

The small-town cafes were generally good, or at least good value. The exception was a place in Tirau where the flies crawling up the windows were more animated than the staff.

The Australian cricket team has been bowled out in the time it took for our meals to appear.

And, no, it wasn't worth the wait.

The countryside is beautiful or at least agreeable, apart from the pine forests. The argument that we have to make a living - as individuals, as communities, as a country - gets short shrift from those who think activities such as forestry are spoiling the planet for our children's children's children.

I'm not so sure that our overriding priority should be hypothetical beings whose parents haven't even been born yet.

Scientific breakthroughs will probably ensure that our descendants live twice as long as us, so it seems only fair that their quality of life should be half as good.

And this hand-wringing over what sort of world future generations will inherit rather ignores the fact that for many human beings the world as it is right now is rather hellish.

Since being unceremoniously ejected from the White House in 1980, Jimmy Carter has devoted much time and energy to making hellish parts of the world a little less hellish. Now he's on the verge of a remarkable achievement - eradicating the guinea worm.

If he succeeds, it will be the first instance of a disease being eradicated since smallpox in 1986.

In that year there were three million reported cases of this excruciatingly painful affliction. (The parasite is ingested via drinking water, grows to around a metre in length, then erupts from blisters.)

The Carter Foundation's campaign of education and distribution of water purification strainers has reduced the number of cases last year to 1700, mostly in Sudan.

Carter, now 86, has vowed to outlive the guinea worm. But his unglamorous, unstinting and largely unappreciated work has done little to enhance his reputation.

He remains the benchmark of liberal ineffectuality and a prime target of that curious pejorative, habitually delivered with a curl of the lip, do-gooder.

Carter is routinely described as a peanut farmer, which is true as far as it goes. He was also a naval officer involved in America's nuclear submarine programme and a modernising governor of Georgia, but those parts of his CV don't conform to the narrative.

Sarah Palin, who during the 2008 presidential campaign sneered at Barack Obama's background as a community organiser, recently joined the dots. Asked to summarise Obama's presidency, she offered, "Two words: Jimmy Carter."

Palin claims that she is "very busy helping people and causes", which is also true as far as it goes; the person in question being herself, the cause being her presidential aspirations.

It's conservatively estimated that in the nine months after her abrupt resignation as governor of Alaska, with 18 months of her term to run, Palin made $16 million through books, speaking engagements and availing herself of the platform obligingly provided by Fox News.

It says something about today's society that we hang on Palin's every tweet and treat her as a serious political figure when all she seems to be good at, or interested in, is self-promotion, while continuing to deprecate Carter despite his measurable contribution to mankind.