Compared to the bureaucratic nightmare that California’s high speed rail initiative has come to, Brightline was meant to show much much more efficient handling something like this over to a private company would be. That was the idea in 2018, when Brightline launched. Today, a person is killed by a Brightline train every 13 days its’ in service.

If we are leveraging AMBER alerts as a way to convince ourselves that in the off-chance a child will be harmed by a stranger, all we have to do is send messages and activate the citizens around us, we are greatly mistaken.

Why in this modern world where we are the most “advanced” we’ve ever been, do we fail more than ever to trust that specialization and abstraction layer designed to make our lives easier? The answer can be found in so many tendrils of history, but I want to dissect it from an unexpected place: the vividly gruesome, unlikely, and confronting story of TWA Flight 800.