Experience

My Mother works as a pharmacist and delivers medicine to sick and hurt patients of all ages, ranging in multiple variations of diseases to accidents. Out of all her years of working there, it was the story of her co-worker who was severely injured and her 2 year-old child who was killed that stuck with me and made me realize that driving has a much bigger risk than people expect. Containing the knowledge of driver education serves as a critical foundation for creating safe driving habits for the newest drivers, all the way up to the more experienced drivers, teaching people road etiquette, and how to become aware of their surroundings at all times.

The story of my Mother’s coworker takes place a couple of years ago. The Coworker and her soon to be 3-year-old son were driving to his grandparents house to drop off his Birthday invitation which was coming up in about a week or so. On the way there, there was a young 18-year-old woman who was freshly in college driving in the residential area, driving around 77 MPH, while on her phone; meaning she was not paying attention. The young girl hit my mother’s coworker and her child, flipping the car over several times, the glass on the windows shattering; similar to something you’ll see from a movie. The Coworker was rushed to the ER and the baby had to get air-lifted by a helicopter to the hospital. The Coworker didn’t see her child for the next couple of days due to the short coma condition she was in. When she was able to wake up and see her child, he was smiling with a tear running down his face. She heard a gurgling sound of some sort, so she lifted up his blanket covering up his body and coming from the tubes in his stomach, he was bleeding out and flatlined. Instead of celebrating his birthday in the next couple of days, they were grieving at his funeral.

This example truly demonstrates the huge impact that nobody sees behind the accidents from being distracted from phones, another person in the car, changing the radio, and the list can go on. Achieving the status of being a good driver requires a mixture of personal commitment and the willingness to pay attention to the road at all times. Speaking from first hand experience, trying to be on your phone and drive isn’t worth it because there were multiple instances of when I was driving home and I was looking for the next song or directions and I almost crashed. The times that I have done that, I put my phone down and told myself, “Never again, it’s not worth smashing into someone else’s car”. Truth be told, it feels like it does no harm to take a quick glance at your phone for a couple of minutes, but it isn’t worth it. It’s unprofitbale because you aren’t only putting yourself at risk, you’re putting the people who are driving beside you and behind you at risk because you have no clue what they are doing or trying to do. To be the change you want to see on the road, you have to lead by example and be the person that doesn’t touch their phone.

Change begins when you start to encourage safe driving skills to the one who are driving with you, driving you, and starting to learn how to drive. Another way to promote change is to consider volunteering with organizations in the area that assist young drivers on tips and tricks that allows them to be safe to themselves and everybody else on the road. Being one of the youngest cousins in my family, the majority of the people who I was close to were driving, meaning they got to teach me and I got to observe. Someone who I really loved to observe were parents, especially since they don’t drive fast or too slow. Something that sticks with me while I drive on the freeway which I know makes me a good driver is never needing to go faster than 73 MPH and I should never need to hit my break while driving on the freeway. I should never hit my brakes because if I do, then that means I was driving too fast, all relevant to the speed of the car in front of me. I know I’m driving at a good distance apart from the driver in front of me when they hit their brakes, and all I have to do is take my foot off the gas so I can naturally slow down.