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.