Enough is enough. Too many children have died when parents or guardians left them unattended in cars. As summer’s heat rises, such neglect, in effect, is a death sentence. Wake up, America, and don’t ever leave small children behind in a hot vehicle, which one emergency physician says is like “leaving your child in a lit oven.”

Besides protecting the child’s life, you may be helping your own. Increasingly, parents are being arrested and charged with such offenses as child abuse, child neglect or child endangerment. The last can be a felony leading to a jail sentence. Was it worth it to leave the child alone while you went inside a store for some cigarettes?

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America is at war — not with another country, but with its own drunk drivers. You may not sense that your country is at war with them, but drunk drivers — by default if not design — are definitely at war with America, inflicting far more deaths, injuries and damages that many military conflicts.

Each year, the car carnage caused by drunk driving totals around 16,000 deaths, hundreds of thousands of injuries and many billions of dollars in damages.

For far too long, enough has been enough. Yet the plague continues. Each day, law-abiding people die in horrific accidents, and all because drunks were loose on our roads and highways. Despite decades of effort and outstanding crusaders such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), the terrible toll persists.

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A year and a half ago, the heparin overdose of actor Dennis Quaid’s twins was big news. The legal settlement just announced in the case isn’t as big of a news story to most media, but it’s also very significant.

The Associated Press reports that Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles has offered a $500,000 settlement in the case, which the Quaids have accepted. Half of that money will go to each of the twins: Zoe Grace and Thomas Boone. Also, Cedars-Sinai will pay for any additional medical care the Quaid twins ever need related to their injury, though they seem to have recovered.

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In ancient times before cell phones, texting and other multi-tasks put safe driving in the back seat for too many people, we were often warned about leaving pets in a locked car on a hot day. But these days, even small children who are already in the back seat can be subjected to such dangerous indifference by distracted drivers who leave them in a car.

Across America, children are dying because parents or guardians who are in too big of a hurry or too much of a multi-tasking fog forget and leave them locked in a car as temperatures climb toward 100 degrees. Such a sad child death happened again Sunday in St. Augustine, Fla. Don’t let it happen on any day to the child for whom you are utterly responsible.

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Beyond groups such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving — and individual victims of drunk drivers — America goes about its business each day with precious little regard for the national nightmare of drunk driving and the horrific toll it relentlessly carves from our society.

Every day new tragedies erupt and new statistics add up. Yet not enough is being done about it, which is one reason why MADD just severed its ties with the “Century Council,” an activist group — funded by the liquor industry itself — with which MADD had collaborated.

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It’s bad enough that 18 wheelers, semi trucks, big rigs, diesel trucks and tractor trailers are slaughtering thousands of innocents on America’s roads and highways. Now we learn that our beef with the trucking business may include beefy drivers.

Sleep scientists at Harvard University have discovered a strong link between overweight drivers and apnea sleep, a sleep disorder which puts drivers at high risk of driving while asleep at the wheel. As MSNBC reports, at Harvard they’re calling for mandatory testing of obese drivers, which they believe will help reduce the 5,200 deaths and 100,000 injuries yearly in this country’s large truck accidents.

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