Sometime back around ten years ago- maybe fifteen- I decided that it’s ridiculous for people to drown simply because they don’t know how to swim, and that it should be a mandatory school subject. It should be taught in first grade or before. Swimming is not complicated; it’s easy to learn, and anyone can be taught to do it in multiple ways (breast stroke, side stroke, back stroke, dog paddle, etc.) in under an hour.
But then, I looked up the statistics for drowning, and I had to rethink the whole thing- the U.S. only has around 6,500 drownings per year(about 1 to 50,000 people per year drown here), making it incredibly more dangerous than terrorism but still statistically meaningless and, ultimately, unimportant unless you personally know someone who has drowned, which begs the question of why I have to hear about six people in Louisiana who drowned, and why you’re reading about it in my blog. Sorry about that- I’ll try to keep it more statistically relevant next time.
