Driving isn’t Carefree

Ray Pleasants

Driving isn’t Carefree

Driving is one of the most self-fulfilling, yet dangerous acts that we humans do. From a young age we are taught that driving grants you freedom, brings you a sense of responsibility and adulthood. Because of this we as humans are eager to learn how to drive and achieve our goal in obtaining our license. But do we really take it as seriously as we should, considering we are in control of huge metal machines barreling down the road at high speeds, or are we just excited to achieve a milestone and after that, it becomes irrelevant?

Driver’s education is the main building block in our road to driving. Everyone is required to take it during high school or before they can obtain their license. But as I have seen in my school or been told about from other students, is that teachers just casually graze over the information they are given or just read from a slideshow. They don’t highlight or speak of all the dangers of reckless driving or what the real responsibility of being able to drive is and even if they do, they are not taken seriously by their students. This responsibility of being allowed to drive is to drive as safe and smart as possible on the road and be mindful as to not endanger only yourself, but the people around you. I feel as though our driver’s education programs across the country, can be taken a lot more seriously and teachers must come at this topic with a much sterner tone, so that their students can really understand what the dangerous of being careless on the road fully entail. Not just in schools either, adults can use a refresher on their driving techniques because in my experience, there are driving rules that were broadcast on many tv shows, new stations and from our parents that when I took driver’s ed for the first time, were out of date. We as a society should have a more serious outlook on driving and getting information out about how impactful it can truly be, as well as sharing stories of tragedies in the past to hopefully show people that they should take this a lot more serious than ever. Yes, I have been in 3 car accidents in my lifetime and all of them were with my friends. Now I would say they were strong drivers for our age, but they also were doing very reckless things while driving, such as texting, to cause these accidents. And social media is a big part of our lives, but we must realize that, it isn’t worth more than ours or anybody else’s life. And finally, as a whole we can work together to share more information about the dangers of reckless driving and when we see the carelessness of other drivers, we should let them know what they’re doing is wrong and hopefully save them from making a fatal mistake.