Choices

Imagine this – you’re driving down a back road at 10pm, coming home from a friend’s house. You realize that it’s getting late, and you never texted your mom that you were on the way. So while you are driving, you pull out your phone, just to send a “quick” text. It suddenly gets bright – a bit too bright for 10pm at night. You look up to a pair of blinding white headlights. The car swerves, the tires screech, and the world goes black.

This scary, possibly life ending moment, happens far too often to teen drivers. Ideally, no driver, especially a teen driver, should have to go through that. A split second that feels like an eternity, wondering if you will crash, if you will live, or if you will die. It is terrifying to think that just a few seconds could have such a dire consequence. But our choices dictate our lives, and each choice leads to a different version of our life. And sometimes, the consequences of our actions can be extremely severe.

As teens, we’re susceptible to distractions. It could be “quickly” responding to a text, or changing the music. It could be as simple as a funny joke that a passenger made, or something as serious as drinking before driving. In my experience, teens give in to peer pressure easily. We could be pressured to drive faster, to drink, or to drive when we don’t feel comfortable. Our lack of experience driving also results in more mistakes made, mistakes that could be life-ending in dangerous situations. We don’t know what the future brings, and that is both good and bad. While driving, we could be safe one second, and then in a ditch the next.

Having completed driver’s education, I was provided with extensive examples of lives lost due to mistakes made by teen drivers. My community recently lost a student from my high school to a car accident. It’s unfair – no family should ever have to go through a loss like that, and no teen should lose their life so early. That day, it wasn’t just another teen driver lost to a fatal crash. It was a beloved member of my community, of my school, who was loved by his friends and family. While I didn’t know him personally, I, along with everyone else, felt the heavy weight that came with losing him. The realization of how quickly moments in life happen, how serious life can become, brought us back to reality. It brought our community and school together, making us all realize how blessed we are to still be alive, and how we need to make it our responsibility to prevent another tragic accident like this.

The number of accidents shouldn’t be so high that we are used to hearing about the death of a teen driver. It shouldn’t be so high that each death counts as a data point, or just another number. We must drastically decrease, or get rid of, teen driver deaths. No one should ever feel like their child, or sibling, or best friend has been stolen from them.

Luckily, there are ways that we can prevent this. We can prevent another family, another school, and another community from ever experiencing that same pain. Driver’s education is the most important way to ensure that teen drivers make safe decisions while driving. Not only does driver’s education teach us basic road rules, it also engrains in us how dangerous driving can become. It equips us with the tools to deal with negative influences such as distractions and peer pressure. We realize, from this class, that what we choose to do in these situations is controlled by only us, and we have to make the decision that is safer. Driver’s education also gives us an opportunity to correct our road skills, and to ensure that we are safe drivers, through the in-car lessons.

However, no matter how much teen drivers are educated, there is no way to definitively prevent a crash. There are many other factors that contribute to a car accident, some that are out of the hands of the teen driver. It could be a drunk driver. It could be the fact that the teen had a lot of homework, and didn’t get much sleep. As a community, we can encourage safe driving through periodic workshops, or encourage schools to offer driving check-ins or classes. Schools could also ensure that they are giving students an opportunity to rest properly, whether that be through minimizing homework or enforcing a later start time.

And finally, it is ultimately in the hands of us, the teens. We need to understand right from wrong, and be willing to put the safety of ourselves and others before our impulses. A text can be checked in the parking lot. An Uber can be called. But a life can’t be brought back.