Your death will be televised

Early this morning I was dimly aware of a helicopter. Then it got louder, and louder, and louder. Finally I got up an looked out of the skylight at the end of the end, yup sure enough there's a helicopter hovering over our building. I turn on the TV to see what's up, expecting that home desperado is holed up in the hood and the police are waiting to nab him. However all they are showing is traffic on the freeway.

So at 6:30am I get dressed and go to the roof. To my surprise there are no less than four helicopters within a few hundred yards of my building hovering at about 500ft, and all pointed towards the freeway. And there they stayed. One for each of Channels 2, 4, 5 and 7 showing all the TV viewers the same view of the freeway with a big truck, a smashed up car and a huge tailback all the way to the Bay Bridge. I went back to bed and tried to sleep, but it was another hour before they finally buzzed off to somewhere else.

It turns out the crash involved a fatality and some poor person died in that car. Apart from the noise and aggravation caused by four helicopters sitting over a residential neighborhood I ask you, why does it require four helicopters to televise a fatal accident? While rubber-necking ourselves we are always quick to chastise the other people doing it too, we rubber neck the rubber neckers. So why does TV encourage it with four helicopters rubber necking for the other several million Bay Area viewers who didn't happen to be passing by?

Why is it that society is so fascinated by carnage on our roads and yet feels no real urge to do something about the 40,000 or so people who die on our roads each year? I think its the very disconnect with reality that TV introduces, so it has become an accepted fact that people will always die on our roads each day. They will just become inconvenient impacts on our transit times, economic blips on the efficiency of cars; and yes, in some bizarre final act of your participation in society, if you die on the freeway your death will be televised.