In Michigan, Boys Will Be Boys

I learned to drive in Michigan—and not the city side of Michigan or on the shoreline of one of our great lakes. I learned on dirt roads that if you drove too fast, a rock could come flying and break your windshield, the Michigan where there weren’t railings from trains everywhere, and where the cops didn’t hug the curb (only rusted tractors during harvest season did).

In the fast-paced world of modern transportation, the importance of safe driving cannot be overlooked. When you turn onto a road, a driver must understand that they are entering a shared space where individual actions could potentially severely impact the life of others. A text saying “almost home” from a wife could end with her car twisted around a street light while a father getting ice cream for his daughter could nearly miss the wife’s car and end up slamming into the wrangler of a student on her way to tennis practice. Entering that shared space is a commitment to ensuring the well-being of all on the road. Safe driving is not just a set of rules to follow. It is not traffic regulations and speeding culture. Speeding culture has infected our society. It is “cool” to speed, one speeds to work because it is so much more important than anything else, and one debates how close that pedestrian really is when driving through school parking lots.

My mom calls speeding a disease. It’s a disease that my dad has. There’s proof in his three pickups that have been crushed to twisted tin, the scars on his forearm, and the history of tickets in his glove box. Diseases come in all shapes and sizes: environmental factors, genetic factors, and more. And no matter how the disease was passed on—environmental or genetic—my brother has the same disease. My brother who got his license only a few months ago has been diagnosed. Symptoms started early, in his childhood where not only did he want to drive, he wanted to speed down our Michigan dirt roads. And then he got his permit, drove too fast and without care too often. Drove in such recklessness that my mother would not get in the car with him anymore. However, the thing about diseases, one can not treat it if they refuse to admit that there is a disease. My family brushes it off as “boys will be boys.” Maybe boys will be boys, but when that boy is twisted between inflamed metal in a ditch in the countryside where no one drives, where are the people that always hush with “boys will be boys.” Where are the hushes that will take out those flames and the hushes that might realize that this truly is a problem? I hear the hushes of “boys will be boys” but I don’t hear the other hushes.

What I was also told growing up, is that only boys are able to get this disease. So when I was speeding down the highway to Kansas City, I would get the “did you let someone else drive your car? A girl can not drive that fast, who is driving your car?” speech. When I rolled through every pot hole so harshly that my car rocked and rocked ‘till I felt like I may flip, I got told how cute I was. There was no chance that I had this disease—this disease that may be genetic, may be environmental, may just be a disease we all battle with at one time or another—there was no chance for me.

I don’t have the “I totaled a car and lost my best friend” speeding story. I will not be hushing that around this camp fire. However, I did have the “I am only speeding to prove that a woman can do what a man can do” realization. There are more roots to this former speeding habit other than “she wants to go fast.”

I was lucky, however. I grew out of my habit quickly. I realized that replacing a car is expensive and I already have too many student loans out. I realized that I want to laugh with my friends in the car and not tell their parents that I was the driver when we crashed into a tree. I realized that when my puppy sits in the passenger seat all buckled in and she looks at me with her large eyes, she trusts me. She trusts me to get her home safe and to drive like her life means something more than nothing to me. I realized that my life means more than the 95 m/h flashing on my dash.

In our fast-paced modern world, we need to slow down. The commitment we make to one another is present and something we have vowed each day we start our engine. The sense of urgency does not need to be present on the road, the sense of “I need to get to my destination safe” should be the most prevalent feeling. In this fast-paced modern world, we need to redebate how important that flashing 95 m/h really is.