Is Going Viral Worth Losing Your Life?

Is Going Viral Worth Your Life?

Responsible driving is a very important issue for me. My dad was caused an accident because he decided it was okay if he drove drunk with my and my brother in the car. He was lucky that he didn’t severely injury anyone but my brother and I both spent a week in the hospital and I lost a lot of my peripheral vision as a result of some minor head trauma. The other person was able to walk away basically unscratched. Since that accident, I have always advocated for safe driving. The idea of safe driving is constantly evolving. At one point it was making sure everyone is wearing a seatbelt (and it’s odd that it’s just become a law in New York that you must wear your seatbelt in cabs and ubers). Then it became solely about drunk driving. Recently distracted driving has become the forefront of the safe driving conversation. I think it is imperative that we are proactive about these issues. Being proactive starts with us. I will always offer to be the designated driver and have sat on panels to talk about distracted driving when I was in high school. I am that person who sits in your car and will tell you to focus on the road and not pay attention to your phone or the radio. It’s incredibly hard now a days to only focus on the road with increasing pressure to bring it on the aux and with a growing addiction to our phones. Especially in 2020. We are constantly checking our phone and looking to see who likes our content and to check the news. There are so many different distractions. Even I can’t resist sometimes when that notification comes through. We live in a world where we feel like we always have to know what Is happening, or if we miss that one call, our lives will be drastically altered. With the rise of viral video apps like tik tok, it is only getting worse! I always cringe when I see people filming tik toks while they are driving and the see how viral they get because of it. And very seldom are their comments on the posts about them driving-no, it’s always “great content” or “Wow so cool”. We have to do better. We have to have stricter restrictions and punishment for unsafe and distracted driving. We have to be more proactive in our approach to dealing with distracted driving. I know that I got off lucky in the accident I was involved, some people deal with life long injuries or even lose their lives. I don’t want to see anyone else go through what my family did because my dad decided he could drive safely while intoxicated. I believe that we are going to see a huge rise in distracted driving deaths in the next couple of years. And I can’t help but wonder, is going viral worth losing your life? Or worse, the life of someone else?