The evolving needs of a severely disabled boy were a real commitment for loving parents as they juggled two jobs and two other children, and Devon passed away two weeks ago.
The only other young person’s funeral I have attended was the 20-year-old son of a farmer client, killed in a road crash, 35 years ago. The young man was a shearer, working hard, saving for his farm, and with his whole life ahead of him. His parents were pillars of the community with interests Northland-wide.
The three sisters were absolutely distraught at the funeral and his mother never really recovered. When community members saw the shearing handpiece on the coffin, the emotions ran raw and were palpable.
Both of these funerals were of young people, buried by their parents. One whose passing was inevitable and, while the hole left is real, there is a sense of relief and moving on. The other was a life cut short in tragic circumstances, the family never really recovering and the young man becoming another road toll statistic.
At the time of writing, 11 people have lost their lives on Northland roads in the past 33 days. That’s one every three days. The oldest was 86, the youngest was 17. Nine of the 11 were under the age of 40, with their whole lives ahead of them.
The circumstances of each of these crashes make challenging reading and there are multiple factors involved. Most were avoidable and four of them were either not wearing a crash helmet or seatbelt.
The thing is that all of these people had families, friends, work and recreation colleagues. They leave a hole in many lives but are not personalised in any media, and generally rate only a couple of column inches. They are not named in the crash analysis report and are now just part of our road toll statistics.
The question I am asking is, ”Has our Northland road toll become so horrific, that we have become desensitised to it, and we no longer care?”
It’s a phenomenon known as psychic numbing, the idea that “the more people die, the less we care”.
The death of an individual can have a powerful effect on our emotions, but as numbers rise so does our indifference. Researcher Paul Slovic, of the University of Oregon, explains that, “We don’t deal with numbers in magnitude very well. If we are talking about lives, one life is tremendously important and valuable, and we will do anything to protect that life, or rescue that person.
“But as numbers increase with tragedy, we become desensitised and have less of an emotional response to them. We can respond to and focus on the tragedy of just one person but 10, a hundred or a thousand becomes too much.”
So, protesters worldwide took to the streets to demonstrate against police brutality and systemic racism in the wake of the killing of George Floyd. The photograph of Alan Kurdi, the 3-year-old Syrian boy seen drowned on a Mediterranean beach, then carried by a soldier, caused a global reaction to the Syrian civil war.
The recent tragedy of the drowning of Karnin Petera at Abbey Caves, and the outrage for Linda Woods, the Kaikohe home invasion victim, causes us to focus much more on those circumstances, than the 11 deaths in 33 days recently, on Northland roads.
There is a famous quote from a Holocaust survivor, Abel Hertzbeg, who says, ”There were not six million Jews murdered, there was one murder six million times.”
One person has perished on Northland roads every three days over the past month. All were individuals who are loved, missed and remembered. Think about them as individuals and not just our road toll statistics, and consciously drive safer.
