Name: Rachel Powell-Young
From: Washington, DC
Votes: 10
A
coffin is not an option
By
Rachel Powell-Young
It’s a Monday
morning and you’re in the car on your way to your destination. You
turn on the radio and hear the same thing every morning: Car accident
on the beltway; lanes closed, avoid the area. You think to yourself
that every morning it’s the same thing and you’re surprised it
hasn’t happen to you. All of a sudden you’re at the stop light
and you hear a loud BANG and your body jolts forward. You jinxed it.
I’ve been in only minor crashes in which the car I was in was just
tapped from behind by a distracted driver. I wish I could say the
same for my friends and family. In 2018, one of my friends were stuck
by a distracted driver while she was in the cross walk. She was more
fortunate than the 6,000 plus pedestrians who were killed in 2018
alone. My sister however, has been in over 3 car accidents and has
totaled the car every time. The responsibility fell on her in some
of the crashes because she was the distracted driver in the
situation. She is alive and more fortunate than the nearly 1.25
million
drivers and passengers globally who are killed each year in car
crashes. In the United States alone over 37,000 people are killed in
car crashes every year. That’s over 37,000 people who are mothers,
fathers, siblings, uncles, aunts, coworkers and friends who are taken
from people every year. It is important these numbers decrease so
people are not losing their loved ones and the 1,600+ children who
are killed every year in car crashed are able to stay alive and grow
up and potentially change the world.
Decreasing these
numbers takes the commitment of every driver on the road. Stricter
laws for distracted drivers need to be enforced. Distracted diving
isn’t just from using the phone. Distracted driving is not having
your eyes on the road, music playing and singing along, messing with
or trying to fix something or someone in the car while driving and
simply thinking about another situation in your head while driving.
Steps to change this can be to have every person who is renewing
their driver’s license to take a short class on the new rules of
the road before getting their new license. Other steps are to require
that distracted drivers be required to pay a fairly high fine or be
jailed. Steps myself as a new driver can take are to not blast my
music, keep my eyes on the road at all times and not allow passengers
who are in the car with me to distract me. I also won’t eat and
drive because that is another distraction. Driving requires ones
undivided attention and that is exactly what I plan to give every
time I drive a car. My goal and what should be every person’s goal
is to drop that number from 37,000+ to 0 deaths annually all
together.
