Gambling With Lives
2026 Driver Education Round 1
Calin Jerry
Miami Gardens, FL
Tens of thousands are killed by distracted driving every year, and for too long, I was one of those drivers responsible for this statistic without ever meaning to be. It begins with acknowledging how perfectly normal that danger started to feel, and breaking the habit of opening my phone at red lights and stop signs.
I didn’t believe that I was careless. I wore my seatbelt. I followed the speed limit. It signaled before every turn. I did as much as driving instructors and safety pamphlets instructed me to do. But when I was stopped at the red lights and stop signs, I let my guard down in a way that could have cost someone their life. I had constructed an entire identity in terms of being a cautious driver, and that identity was blinding me to the one place where I wasn’t careful, not at all.
It started small. A peek at my phone to skip a song. So I scrolled TikTok as I waited for the light to shift. None of it felt dangerous; it felt normal to me. That was not dangerous at the moment. That’s why distracted driving is so pernicious; you are not reckless while driving. It feels like multitasking. No wonder it lacks some of the world's sensations. It is nothing at all. It is a decision, repeated ad nauseam, to believe that nothing bad will happen at precisely the time when something bad is expected.
The seconds that I looked down at my phone were the same seconds that I could have spent standing and watching a pedestrian cross the crosswalk, or seeing a car run a red light, or noticing a child chasing a ball into the street. I was betting with another person’s life around a song change, not even knowing I was gambling. That is the part that haunts me now. I wasn't reckless on purpose. I was reckless by accident, by default, by the gradual erosion of attention no one tells you about because it doesn't look like danger. It looks like boredom. It looks like waiting.
Music, in its own silent way, was a risk. I never stopped raising the volume until everything on the track diminished to the beat of the car: no sirens, no horns, no people screaming to talk over me to pay attention. My idea was that all I had was having fun driving. In reality, I was shutting myself off from the kind of sounds that keep drivers safe. A horn is not noise; it is a warning. An ambulance siren is not merely a sound; it is someone’s chance to get help sooner. I was hitting the brakes on my consciousness by blasting my music. I had transformed my car into a cocoon, and I told myself that a cocoon meant freedom, when it was really isolation from the very world I was meant to observe.
Recognizing these habits was uncomfortable for me. It’s so easy to have distracted driving as something other people do; the driver who whizzes past on the highway, the guy who skates through a red light with a cell phone in his hand. It is harder to admit that I was part of the problem, as well, only in smaller, quieter ways that I had convinced myself didn’t count. That I was not the news’s cautionary tale. I was just some bloke on a light, doing something so small that there was hardly any thought of it as a choice. But that’s precisely one reason it mattered. Little-recognized options are those whose significance can be tallied as a habit, and a habit is the one that came closest to causing someone injury. That is where breaking the habit starts (not with a big, flashy wake-up call, but with the soft-spoken, uncomfortable caveat that I had normalized the dangerous behavior).
Now, before I even start the car, I put the phone on Do Not Disturb and put it where it is not reachable, not in my cupholder, not in my lap, but in my bag in the backseat. If I have to change a song, I do it before I put the car in drive, or I wait until the car is safely parked. I also have music in the background, but I've put it down so I can hear the world at hand: horns, sirens, those mundane sounds that inform me of danger before it is too late. I’ve had to retrain myself toward sitting with the discomfort of boredom at a red light, to not reach for things to fill it, but to listen to the silence. That discomfort, apparently, is a small price to pay for the knowledge it pays back.
It all seems minor in retrospect, yet it is a more significant choice to assume responsibility for a behavior I thought was innocuous. Distracted driving doesn’t always look like texting at seventy miles per hour. At times, it feels like looking up at a red light. It looks like a hand reaching for a phone on autopilot, out of necessity, rather than a life-saving need. I’m not going to pretend that just looking at somebody is all there is to it. It's time, and it's dangerous, and I will not take this line of gambling any longer. Drivers who have always told themselves "it's just a second" are people I get now because I was that person. I hope more of us can see it before the second costs something we can’t get back.
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