Remember What They Are

Remember What They Are

By: Kylee Julson

The road is dark. The sun had set hours ago. I know I’m at the wheel, but I can probably just close my eyes for a second…NO! I am at the wheel of a hundred-pound hunk of steel that is going down the road at 60 miles per hour. This is the sentence that I tell myself whenever I am considering closing my eyes when I’m tired or if I dropped something on the ground. During this essay I am going to be talking about a hypothetical driver, and for the sake of my sanity, instead of addressing him as “the driver” he will be called Ben.

After a couple years or even months, people automatically think that they are experts at driving. They may be good, but the truth is cars can be unpredictable, and so can humans. People mess up every day, we aren’t perfect, but we should be realizing that one of those mistakes shouldn’t happen in a car. Being distracted even for a moment can cause catastrophic events. A child walking on the cross walk, another car in the lane next to us, who knows, maybe a moose running in front of the car. If these things happen while Ben is looking for the phone that was dropped on the ground, he will have no clue and couldn’t have been aware to know how to divert the problem from happening. A simple problem that could have been solved after the car was parked, would have caused a bigger one.

Hey, guess what! Speed limits are there for a reason! Sure, the dude next to Ben’s car was revving his engine wanting to race, but he knows better, or not. Accepting the race by revving his own engine, Ben and the other driver watch the light and wait for it to turn green. As soon as the tree color emerges, the pedals are to the floor, but oops, granny wasn’t out of the cross walk in time. Ben had to swerve and ended up with a nice pole shaped dent in his car. I don’t think Ben’s insurance will cover that. If only there was a sign to tell him not to go that fast, oh wait there was. Not much good could come from speeding. It is just as bad, if not worse, then distracted driving.

I do know that sometimes Ben could get away with it, but why should he even risk it. The probability of someone dying in a car crash compared to a plane crash is 1 in 5,000 and 1 in 11 million according to PBS. I doubt that most people would want to be that 1 in 5,000. I know that this is a statistic that I need to remind myself while driving. That along with the facts of how cars are tons of metal, soaring down the road at unbelievable speeds. Ben and everyone else need to remember this and be sure to drive safely. Driving recklessly should simply not be an option.