The Carrolton School Bus Crash
The division of wealth is unevenly distributed throughout society’s so called social ladder. The “haves,” those who run corporations or have major influence on government decisions, control the majority of the wealth and resource available to achieve that wealth. Their major purpose it to build on that wealth no matter what the consequence may be. Those decisions sometimes negatively impact the lives of the “have nots,” people who, like us, have minimal if any influence on corporate spending and decisions.
On May 14th, 1988 a group of children and adults from the First Assembly of God Church in Radcliff, Kentucky got aboard a Ford built 1977 Superior B-700 school bus and headed to King’s Island amusement park. King’s Island is located about 170 miles from Radcliff where the church is located. After spending the whole day at the amusement park, the group got on the bus and began traveling on Interstate seventy-one in northern Kentucky back to Radcliff. At about 10:45 P.M. while heading south on Interstate 71 just outside of Carrollton, Kentucky, the bus collided with a black pickup truck driven by Larry W. Mahoney.
Mahoney was traveling north in the southbound lane at an extremely high amount of speed. The right front of the pickup truck hit the right front of the bus, breaking off the bus’s suspension and driving the leaf spring backward into the gas tank mounted outside the frame, just behind the front door. The spring speared the sixty-gallon tank, which had just been filled ten minutes earlier, punching a two and a half-inch hole in it. The gas tank caught fire and killed twenty-seven of the sixty-seven people on board. If the pickup had hit a few inches to the right, it would have been stopped by the bus’s frame rail instead of shearing trough sheet metal toward the fuel tank.
In 1974 Congress passed school bus safety legislation, three years before the Carrollton school bus was built. Manufactures, like Ford Motor Company, managed to delay the implementation of automotive safety standards, including those relating to school-bus safety. In 1971, President of Ford Motor at the time, Lee Iacocca, was known to have lobbied President Richard Nixon to put off costly new rules for cars. He was quoted as saying, “Safety has really killed all of our business. He could have also been lobbying for the Ford Pinto, which was surrounded by much controversy due to the placement of its gas tank.
"An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge." Classic Reader. 2009. BlackDog Media, Web. 2 Dec 2009. .
Time and time again we hear politicians and office holders preach the need for a powerful middle-class. You may then be surprised to hear that “about 82% of America’s net worth belongs to the top 20%, the next 80% of people only own about 18% of America’s wealth” (UCSC). Some may argue that this disproportion is the beauty of capitalism, the chance to create an empire. I argue that the proportions are simply unfair. Why is it that “ the average CEO makes 350X as much as his/her employee” (UCSC)?
Sklar, Holly. “The Growing Gulf Between the Rich and the Rest of Us”. They Say I Say. Gerald Graff, Cathy Birkenstein, Russel Durst. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009. Print.
In 1967, a fire was started in Jay Mountain Church, Tulsa, Oklahoma. Two young men, Ponyboy Curtis and Johnny Cade, were smoking and accidentally dropped a lit cigarette – but did not catch fire till later that day. With no idea of the future, a group of children and adults had a picnic. Some of the kids wandered off to the church, with no consent of any adult, right before the fire. Thankfully, none injured with the two young men saving their lives. Unfortunately, we cannot say the same for Johnny, Ponyboy, and Dally – who was one of their close friend that happened to be with them at the time. Ponyboy had minor injuries, with only a couple of bruises and cuts. Dally broke his arm trying to drag out Johnny and for the most part he was okay.
A group of young, Indigenous adults along with Colten Boushie were consuming alcohol during the day and attempted to break and enter a truck on a nearby farm. They were unsuccessful in following through on their attempt to commit breaking and entering due to a flat tire. In an effort to find help, this group went to the Stanley property in hopes of getting help with a flat tire. Gerald Stanley believed that his ATV was being stolen and fired warning shots believing it would scare the young adults away. When Stanley reached into the vehicle to take the keys, he claims that ‘his gun “just went off”’ (Graveland, 2018).
It’s May 5, 2012. It’s a Saturday night after a stressful week of school. It’s an ordinary spring day. We had been at Truman Lake on the water all day, looking forward to a great night of racing. The sun rose up, the heat was reaching the upper nineties, and conditions were beautiful for a night filled with racing. My uncle had box tickets to the Impact Night at Wheatland Speedway. My mom, dad, brother, and three of our family friends all piled into our seven passenger SUV to head down to Wheatland, MO. Little did we know what was in store. The races started off intense and every race had at least one wreck. After a long day, we were driving home. Exhausted, I had just dozed off on my mom’s shoulder when out of nowhere on Highway 83, we swerved off the road to avoid getting hit head-on by a drunk driver. Sliding every which way through the ditch, we hit a school bus sign; only feet away from guard rail. Thanks to my dad’s retired dirt track racing skills and someone watching over us, everyone in that car is alive today.
One of the factors that create an imbalance of power within a society is a person's socioeconomic status. Often people with low socioeconomic status are undervalued in society. This imbalance can cause issues with the feelings of security and confidence. Also opportunities and choices can be limited for some people, but expanded to others. People often identify with roles of different socioeconomic status groups, based on their own socioeconomic status, and this can limit creativity and the potential of groups or individuals. If the world believes that people can go from “rags to riches” in America, then there should be an opportunity for all socioeconomic groups.
Divisions within the social stratum is a characteristic of societies in various cultures and has been present throughout history. During the middle ages, the medieval feudal system prevailed, characterized by kings and queens reigning over the peasantry. Similarly, in today’s society, corporate feudalism, otherwise known as Capitalism, consists of wealthy elites dominating over the working poor. Class divisions became most evident during America’s Gilded Age and Progressive era, a period in time in which the rich became richer via exploitation of the fruits of labor that the poor persistently toiled to earn. As a result, many Americans grew compelled to ask the question on everyone’s mind: what do the rich owe the poor? According to wealthy
“August 2000, our family of six was on the way to a wedding. It was a rainy day, and Gregg was not familiar with the area. The car hit standing water in the high-way, and started hydro-planing. Greg lost control of the car. Then, the car went backwards down into a ditch and started sliding on its wheels sideways. After sliding for 100 feet or so, the car flipped, at least once. After flipping, the car came to rest on its wheels, and the passenger window broke out.
With each class comes a certain level in financial standing, the lower class having the lowest income and the upper class having the highest income. According to Mantsios’ “Class in America” the wealthiest one percent of the American population hold thirty-four percent of the total national wealth and while this is going on nearly thirty-seven million Americans across the nation live in unrelenting poverty (Mantsios 284-6). There is a clear difference in the way that these two groups of people live, one is extreme poverty and the other extremely
The poor gets poorer, and the rich gets richer. Economically speaking, this is the truth about Capitalism. Numerous people agree that this inequality shows the greedy nature of humankind. The author of the source displays a capitalist perspective that encompasses an individualist approach towards an “un-ideal” economic system. The source articulates a prominent idea that capitalism is far from perfect. The reality is, as long as capitalism exists, there are always those people who are too poor or too rich in the system. We do not need elitists in our society but that is exactly what capitalists are. In this society, people are in clash with those who “have” and those who “have not”, which creates conflict and competition. Throughout
Income inequality continues to increase in today’s world, especially in the United States. Income inequality means the unequal distribution between individuals’ assets, wealth, or income. In the Twilight of the Elites, Christopher Hayes, a liberal journalist, states the inequality gap between the rich and the poor are increasing widening, and there need to have things done - tax the rich, provide better education - in order to shortening the inequality gap. America is a meritocratic country, which means that everybody has equal opportunity to be successful regardless of their class privileges or wealth. However, equality of opportunity does not equal equality of outcomes. People are having more opportunities to find a better job, but their incomes are a lot less compared to the top ten percent rich people. In this way, the poor people will never climb up the ladder to high status and become millionaires. Therefore, the government needs to increase all the tax rates on rich people in order to reduce income inequality.
In American society, there is a large disparity of wealth between the rich and the poor. This wealth disparity has far reaching effects into the areas of politics, education, culture, and more. By using their wealth to dominate politics, education, and culture, the rich perpetuate the exclusion of the poor into the substandard position of poverty.
Wealth inequality is the uneven distribution of resources in a given state or population, which can also be called the wealth gap. The sum of one’s total assets excluding the liabilities equates the person’s wealth also known as the net worth. Investments, residents, cash, real estates and everything owned by an individual are their assets.In reality, the United States is among the richest countries in the world, though a few people creating a major gap between the richest, the middle class and the poor control most of its wealth. For more than a quarter of a century, only the rich American families have shown an increase to their net worth.Thisis a worrying fact for the less fortunate in the country and calls for assessment (Baranoff, 2015).
Money is an essential part of life where every people can satisfy whatever they need and every person in America has a chance to find a job. However, some of the people in the country wanted to go on with their life freely by being a part of a welfare. Furthermore, distribution of wealth is a huge demand of every citizen. Everyone today is trying to look down for every people in the lower class, as they did not give any benefit to the country, waiting for the benefits that they will receive from the government. For instance, when most lower class people have gone through a financial crisis due to overspending, insufficient fund or pay for their work to support themselves and/or their family. The example shows that lower class people made the economy of the country unstable, however, the middle class and the higher class is at fault as well. Furthermore, even though the benefit of that the lower class received is from the middle class, the middle class as well benefits from the higher class. To sum up, every class is at fault towards giving the country’s economy a positive