Picture this: a group of teenagers in a little Sadan causing a general public disturbance in your local Wendy's parking lot. I sit in the passenger seat of this terrible cockpit of death they call an automobile. My hand is firmly gripping the affectionately nicknamed ‘uh-oh’ bar that lies just above my right shoulder.
My ‘friend’ at the wheel takes a hard turn at mock fifty sending us into a drift that you could smell. It’s much like burning rubber, but with a bit more regret. As I tumble in my seat, I can only think one thought at that moment.
The audacity! Do they even know who I am? I am the greatest thing to walk this earth since sliced bread! In fact, I was the guy behind sliced bread. Yep, you're welcome. To think that these narrow-minded fools would even consider putting me into that over glorified toaster of a vehicle is quite honestly, an insult.
Behind the windshield of most every terrifying crack-pot driver is a teenager making bad decisions. Looking at their phone, doing dumb things with their friends, the list is nearly endless. In general, this persists because it’s ‘cool’.
Well fortunately for this world, I’ve never been cool a day in my life. I alone am the sole survivor of this terrible plague of distracted driving. On the male side of things anyway. I continue to maintain my ideals of safe driving, and hope to educate the world on the dangers of distracted driving, and that is why I write this eppisol of knowledge to the world (The 1,000 dollar scholarship money has nothing to do with it, trust me.)
A much more serious experience that left me in a tight spot was when my dad got into a bad car crash on his way home from work. He was waiting at an intersection, when a distracted driver behind him crashed right into the back of his car, sending him right into oncoming traffic. Quite frankly, I’m surprised he managed to live through that.
Because of the actions of one distracted driver, my dad’s back took severe damage, and he had to get surgery for it. His seat belt hit his stomach so hard in the collision that he had damage in his large intestines, and some of them (or whatever term you use for a piece of intestine) had to be removed.
Whilst performing the surgery, the surgeons also removed his appendix since it was close, without telling anyone.
The audacity.
My father was denied the right to his kidney. How ludicrous! But anyway, I’m getting distracted (haha, funny joke.) The real concern, is that people drive distracted because they don’t think that there is a high chance of something going wrong, and quite frankly, they’re right.
Very few bad things happen from a high percent chance, the issue is, people don’t really have a good plan for that small chance that will inevitably be rolled by the dice of fate. Even if something puts you at a .01 percent chance of death, you only need to do it 10,000 times to statistically die. If you put that into a little friend of mine called math, that means that if every human on earth took that chance, roughly 795,000 people would die. That’s about 795,000 more than I would like to die from something stupid like checking your insta.
Very few people die from bad odds. It’s the accumulation of the small risks you take each day that gets you in the end, so we should get rid of the stupid ones, like distracted driving. To be honest, I’m amazed we let people drive giant metal machines of death before they can vote. We give people the power of life and death itself before voting rights, funny huh?
Now, any fool can ramble on about problems, but only the wise man is brave enough to offer a solution, and I, my friends, am quite the wise man (I made sliced bread, remember?).
The solution is to make safe driving cool. Now, like I have stated before, I am not, and never have been cool, however, that doesn’t mean I’m an idiot. That is a completely separate matter.
The way I suggest we do it is by planting spies into teenage society. We aren’t very bright, so it will probably work out with little suspicion. We then make sure these spies are hip and radicle as can be. We then have them show everyone just how TUBULAR and RAD safe driving is. Once again, I don’t really know how coolness works.
Once our little system is in play, we can solve more than just unsafe driving. Think about it, we could finally make kindness cool again. And sandals with socks. Quite frankly, maybe this would all work better if some people decided to be that person rather than a spy network.
In fact, perhaps we all just need to be a better influence on our peers. After all, the reason this whole bad driving thing started was probably from someone watching someone else drive. The best part is, we don’t need to chip into government funds to afford spies. We all have influence on our friends, whether we know it or not. Whether we say it out loud or not.
This isn’t a grand plan with leaders and funding, this is just the hope that a collective effort of people can help out, and it really can. There is no grand solution, no single person who can do this, no man is an island (except for me, I am the sole exception,) but a bunch of people together can… form an island? Bad metaphors aside, not everyone is going to listen, so as a person who will, it is my duty to help others.
I invite everyone, just help where you can.
It’s not as hard as you might think.