Maybe not only progressives die in plane and car crashes.

Last Part of 'Plane and Car Crashes Kill Progressives'

    In this part of my blog I'm going to trash my own thesis.
 My theories of a conspiracy  or conspiracies that kill progressives may fall apart.
     On one school day in February 1959 a harassed high school teacher in Montreal faced a revolt. Outside the day was cold and icy. Yet inside this woman's classroom, things heated up.
    Her students in one grade ten class stood up altogether and remained silent for a few minutes. "What's happening?" the flustered tall blonde teacher asked the class. "What's this all about?"
    This 20 something teacher had lots of trouble controlling her students in all her classes. And this particular grade ten class always caused her problems. Why were they silent now when all they usually did was chat, hum tunes, and talk when she tried to teach?
     After five minutes or more of silence the students sat down and went back to creating their usual mayhem. One 15 year-old with  slicked back greasy hair, said to the teacher, "We're remembering yeasterday, Miss."
"Yesterday?"
"Yes, yesterday three great singers died."
Yesterday was February 3, 1959. On that date three well known singers died in a plane crash in Clear Lake, Iowa. The three were Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.P. the 'Big Bopper' Richardson. Their pilot died too.
    The three singers's deaths was immortalized-sort of- in a song that came out a bit later called 'Three Stars Are Shining Bright'. As one of the classroom memorial leaders said later, "That song is just junk. And except for Buddy Holly I never liked any of these guys's music."
     The students in their few minutes of silence were as usual just causing problems for their teacher. Years later, Don McLean remembered the three dead singers in his runaway 1972 chart topper called 'American Pie'. Frankly McLean's 'American Pie' was not one of his best songs either.
     Yet to get back to my main point. Not one of these four dead people were progressives in any way, and certainly none of the three singers were. Nor was Patsy Cline who died about four years later in Tennessee on March 5,1963. In fact country music singers like Patsy Cline were and are very traditional people. Very very few of them buck big businesses, support peace movements or favour bigger social programs.
    Jim Croce sang gentle songs about love and loss from a working class point of view. Yet Croce was no progressive either. He died in a plane crash in 1973 in Louisiana, alongside his pilot, his manager and four other people. The other six died too. None were left leaning folk.
     One plane crash that did kill a very political person was the shooting down of a South Korean airplane on September 1, 1983. "This could cause a shooting war between the Soviet Union and the United States," a friend of mine said at the time.
    For the plane carried 269 passengers including a very right wing congressman from the U.S. called Laurence MacDonald who came from Georgia. All 269 passengers died and it was a Soviet plane that shot down the Korean airliner.
     This shoot down happened at a time of a renewed U.S.-Soviet Union Cold War. Then U.S. President Ronald Reagan loathed the Soviet Union. "It is an evil empire," he said. Luckily the result of this shoot down heightened Cold War tensions but no war erupted. Yet this plane crash involved a right winger and not a progressive.
      So my theories about car and plane crashes that deliberately target progressives may be wrong. It's hard to prove. So I rest my case because the evidence of a right wing conspiracy that murders progressives in crashes can't be proved conclusively.