This article is being discussed on the Road Star Riders forum regarding a motorcyclist killed. The article seemingly suggests that we shouldn't ride motorcycles.

The article is not very long, here it is in full:

USA - A cement truck driver runs a stop sign, killing a man on a motorcycleA 20 year old Pleasant Hill man is dead after a motorcycle crash. Missouri Highway patrol troopers say a cement truck ran a stop sign at Richland Pkwy. & Walker hitting the motorcycle.

Anthony Barnes was pronounced dead at the scene. He had just bought his motorcycle Monday. He is survived by 2 children, one of them born just last week.

The driver of the cement truck was ticketed for running the stop sign. He was not hurt.

Perhaps what got me the most was the final sentence, noting that the cement truck driver was not hurt.

Not hurt???

He was driving a cement truck, and hit a motorcycle. Why would he be hurt? Why would this even be a concern to anyone reading this?

Note that the source of the above article was a local NBC television station in Kansas City.

To be fair, I believe that the author of this article is not really a "journalist" but a young 20-something-year-old newsroom copywriter who was hired to gather the day's police reports and assemble them into 20 second soundbites to be read by television new anchors using a cookie-cutter formula designed to achieve certain broadcasting effects.

Could you just imagine an actual news anchor reading this on television, and ending with the words, "He was not hurt."

And then his female co-anchor responding, "Gosh, those motorcycles are so dangerous, Paul! And now, here's Marty with the weather..."

Somewhere a family is grieving, and a cement truck driver is wondering what the Hell is going to happen to his future. But I guess the moral that this story leaves us with is that the bigger the vehicle you drive, the more safe you are. Let's forget about the fact that people are known to run stop signs, and just resign ourselves to driving bigger cars. Maybe if we all drove cement trucks, we could remove all stop signs and just not worry about anything.

So let's go ahead and put this biker into the ground, and be thankful that none of us ride motorcycles.

Labels: Missouri Motorcycle Deaths