Deadly driving is all too common, and negligence behind the wheel of a one- to two-ton metal projectile is taken lightly by far too many people. There are permanent scars in my family from the tragic consequences of bad driving. My aunt, my mother’s sister, was driving home from work in August of 1995, just five and a half weeks after I was born. A drunk 15-year-old was driving his even drunker mother down the same road at probably around 100 miles per hour, headed in the opposite direction.

The two never made it where they were going, because they hit my aunt head-on in a curve, full force. She was killed instantly from total body trauma, as was the mother in the passenger seat of the other car. My aunt was 21 years old, a dedicated Christian, a beautiful singer, a CNA student, a sister, and a daughter. She was beloved by her community, and cherished by her family. One drunk, reckless driver ended her time here on earth.

My grandmother never got to see my aunt’s car pull up safely in the driveway that night, where she was sitting anxiously by the window, wondering why her daughter hadn’t come home yet. Instead, a police car pulled up. It was white, the same color as my aunt’s car, and for a heart-stopping second, my grandmother thought it was her daughter. It was the sheriff. He came to the door and gave my grandparents the news that would shatter their world, my mother’s world, and rock the community.

My aunt isn’t the only family member that has died in a vehicle. My mother’s cousin, a very sweet woman, was also driving a vehicle at night. She and her husband had adopted two daughters after unsuccessfully trying to conceive, and then managed to have their own child just after adopting. She was so excited to be a mother.

An underage drunk driver in another car was coming from a restaurant, where he had been served alcohol without being carded. This was, as I understand it, his second offense. He hit my mom’s cousin, and sent her into a coma for three weeks. She woke up screaming, her hands frozen in the same position as they had been when she was clutching the wheel, and she was paralyzed from the waist down. She has been in a wheelchair ever since, only able to participate from the sidelines in her daughters’ lives because of her disabilities.

I could go on—my family is large on my mother’s side, so it’s not statistically surprising that we’ve been impacted so many times by disastrous driving. Some of my family’s suffering, and the suffering of many others, may have been avoided if the drivers (and enablers) in question had been better educated. Many people may not realize what the impact of impaired, distracted, careless, and negligent driving simply because they’ve never been told and shown what it can do.

I was blessed to take an in-person driver’s education course as a teenager, even though my school was too small to offer one. I keenly remember a video they showed in class. It was a European video, German I think, that showed four teenage girls in a car, texted and talking excitedly. Distracted, they crossed over the median and hit an oncoming car with a family inside, killing almost all of the passengers. The video was brutally graphic and realistic, almost traumatizingly so.

The visual of that life-stopping foolish moment has never left me. I still wasn’t nearly as careful of a driver as I should have been in my teens and early twenties, but the training I received in that driver’s ed class probably curbed some of my vehicular behavior. I certainly know that the stories of the horrors my family has gone through has made me very cautious about impaired driving.

I believe that driving education should start long before children are old enough to drive. I don’t mean that we should put middle schoolers behind the wheel, but that schools should start educating them about the responsibilities and dangers of driving much earlier. I’ve heard it said that the more often parents speak to kids about the dangers of drugs, the less likely they are to try them later in life. Similarly, I think that the more often kids hear about safe driving practices, and the consequences of unsafe ones, the more likely they are to make wiser decisions.

I’m also of the belief that driving education should be far more rigorous than it is. Because of the exceptionally dangerous job they do, pilots are required to go through extensive training to get their licenses. They even have to practice recovering a crashing plane. Although I don’t think getting a driver’s license should be quite that expensive and time-consuming, I do think that driving should be held as much more of a hard-earned privilege than it is.

My freshman year in college, I got a call around 2AM from my roommate. Her voice was shaking, and she said that she had been in a wreck. I asked where she was, and as soon as I found out, I left for the place, which was probably less that five minutes from the college. There were police cars and ambulances everywhere, plus two cars that my roommate and her friends had been in.

As I listened to the police asking them questions, the story unfolded. The two cars, both full of college students, had been racing each other for fun down the street. One vehicle, the one my roommate was in, lost control and ran off the road into a large tree. After a possible brief loss of consciousness, my roommate said she and everyone else scrambled to get out of the car, afraid it was going to catch on fire. Miraculously, no one was seriously hurt, but a car was ruined, and my roommate’s parents were horrified when they found out.

I took to heart the lesson I learned from my roommate’s near miss: being young and having fun with friends does not make you invincible. Unwise decisions can catch up to you, and not everyone gets away with minimal injuries.

I’ve become a great deal more even-tempered in my driving since I was a freshman in college, but of course, I’m not perfect. I do my best to stay within the speed limit, use my signals, and use a Bluetooth headset if I need to take a call. I am trying to pay better attention to other distracted driving habits, however, like reaching for objects in the car while I’m driving, adjusting the GPS, or looking at the radio dial too long. It’s critical to always try to be improving as a driver, because it only takes a split second of poor judgment to cost you an insurance rate increase, a vehicle, or even a precious, irreplaceable life.