Rachel
O’Neal 

Repeatedly,
history teachers preach to their students about the importance of
learning the past, so as to avoid the same devastation in the future.
In order to even be a good citizen and a considerate voter, it is
important to first understand your government, how it works, and why
public officials do what they do. The same can be said for drivers.
The more educated motor vehicles are about accidents that occurred in
the past, the more likely they'll be to avoid putting themselves in
the same situations. Thus, leading to a decrease in the number of
deaths as a result of driving.

During
one of the last sessions of drivers ed that I attended,
Mrs. Shearer asked us what she should add to her five-hour course
slide show. She said something along the lines of “What would make
young adults want to CONTINUE to drive safe?”. Immediately I knew
what would affect my peers. My hand shot up and five words blurted
out of my mouth “They need to be scared” I said. Looking back, I
know that scared wasn’t the word I needed. Educated. I wanted my
drivers ed teacher to put in more real stories. But not just stories
of pain. In order to fully educate my peers, they needed to hear the
details behind the horror. They needed real life situations placed
before them with all of the details of the people, and their lives,
and the pets they had, and the people they loved, and what they
wanted to do in the future, and how that all disappeared so
devastatingly, so abruptly. You need to learn about past events in
order to grow and learn for the future.

I
have never lost anyone to a car crash. I have however, seen loved
ones fight for their lives every waking second, in a battle against
cancer. The thing about cancer is that the fights are long and
grueling. Those who have beat cancer have fought very hard for it.
And those who’ve lost, at least the victims I've encountered, have
gone down swinging. Educating yourself in driver safety, in
comparison to cancer treatments, is a walk in the park, and yet it
can have the same lifesaving effects.