Skyllar
Cottingham
A
Message to Drivers Nationwide
In
October of last year, my father was in a car accident. My father is a
logistics manager at an orthopedics company, and from time to time is
forced to sacrifice his evenings taking surgical instruments from
place to place. One evening, in late October, my father was taking a
shipment of surgical screws from Franklin to Murfreesboro, and on his
way home was struck by a drunken woman on her way home from a
restaurant. He was essentially t-boned and lost partial control of
his spine for several months, up until about April of this year he
could only perform part of his duties at work. Why? Because a woman
who left a restaurant incredibly drunk crashed into a light pole and
just kept going home, without any care about her own or others
safety. When she struck my father, luckily there was a man who had
been following the woman from the restaurant and was able to help my
father. When she hit my father, she just kept driving until she got
home, where she was promptly arrested.

Because
of this, safe driving is incredibly important to me. We must improve
our collective driving habits or we will continue to suffer horrible
casualties to one of America’s largest killers. The best way we can
do this is to heighten our education efforts. As annoying as it is
for many people, safe driving is literally a matter of life or death,
or subjectively even worse, a crippled life. I constantly evaluate my
own driving habits to ensure that I’m performing at the best level
of safety that I can, by always paying attention to other drivers as
well as my own habits.

In
conclusion, the best thing we can do to reduce the number of deaths
involved in car accidents is to greatly increase the education
efforts for all drivers, particularly those who are just starting to
drive.