Some people have too much luck

http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/iriks/article3690008.ece

I read in today's newspaper that yet another idiot has attempted to kill himself in a boat. Or so it seems. Police say it looks as though he woke up from impacting a rock wall at high speed, and that he was too inebriated to account for the number of people on board. In the end it transpired that he was driving alone, and that no one else was hurt in the accident. While this may not be a conscious attempt at suicide, operating a boat at high speed at night is in and of itself quite dangerous, and should only be done with the highest possible level of vigilance and attention to one's surroundings. If you're near incapacitated from drink, it is obviously impossible to meet these criteria, to such an extent that it must have been apparent to said idiot.

Some of you may wonder why I'm so worked up about this. Citing Darwin, you might argue that this kind of problem is self-correcting, because sooner or later this idiot will run out of luck and smear himself so thorougly on the helm that he doesn't get away with a simple trip to the hospital. As long as he does this alone, he's only endangering himself, right? Sadly, that is not true. I picture myself on one of my nightly excursions, loosely holding the tiller of a 20ft double-ender and enjoying the beauty of the sea in near darkness, the muted chug-chug of an old single cylinder Marna keeping me company. Life is archetypically serene until I spot navigation lights approaching in the distance. "What an asshole," I think to myslef, "coming so close at speed is simly rude!" Then, in a flash, it dawns on me that he's not just rude, he's oblivious. Had I only realized earlier, or if my boat had the power and maneuverability to take effective evasive action, my vision might have had a happier ending. But neither is true, and in the blink of an eye my tranquil serenity goes through panic to blackness. End of story, end of life.

That is, in a nutshell, why I don't think people ought to get away with that sort of thing. Wishing death or debilitating injury upon a fellow human being is a horrible and unempathic line of thinking, but there are three reasons why I fail to see a better ending to this. First, the idiot in this case got remarkably cheaply away from his mistake, and thus it is unlikely that he learned much. Second, if something truly horrifying happened to him, others might learn from his mistake. And third, he's not my fellow human being. He's not my fellow anything. He's simply an idiot with too much luck.