Wednesday, September 22, 2010

real life analogy

Natasha Pettigrew died on Monday. She was only 30.

She was until recently a law school student at the University of Miami. But because she was a committed environmental activist, she decided to put her studies on hold and return to her home state of Maryland where she was running for the U.S. Senate as the Green Party's candidate. Had she lived she would have been opposing the incumbent Democrat, Barbara Mikulski and the Republican nominee, Eric Wargotz, as well as several other third-party candidates.

But she's gone now. She was accidentally run down while riding her bicycle along Route 202 in Largo, Maryland, by a woman driving a Cadillac Escalade SUV. The driver claims not to have known that she struck a person, and says she thought she had hit a deer or a dog. So she didn't stop, but on arriving home realized that she had dragged Pettigrew's bicycle, which was stuck beneath the vehicle, from the scene of the accident all the way to her house. She and her husband decided to call the police.

Pettigrew, severely injured, died while in a nearby hospital at about 10:30 Monday night. No charges have been filed in the incident.

I'm not even going to point out why this tragedy is an analogy for the downward trajectory of this unravelling society of ours. I assume readers are intelligent enough to understand such an extended metaphor without any prompting.

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