Life and Death

Life and Death

Infantile amnesia is a great phenomenon. Look back at your lives and see what you remember from when you were 3 or 4 years old. There are small fragments of memories that define your collective knowledge of the events you experienced as an infant. Trauma is one such fragment.

My dad was always a safe driver. He went below the speed limit, made sure everyone wore seatbelts, and never had the urge to check his phone. But one day, as a 4-year-old in the back of my dad’s car in the inner-most lane on a freeway, I recall trauma – something that is vividly clear in my mind to this day, one of the few memories I withheld from my time as a 4-year-old.

A car swept into our lane right in front of us at around 125 miles per hour, crashing into a very tall headlight. Immediately, the headlight fell, and the car exploded. My family survived thanks to only a few inches.

We take life for granted, and why shouldn’t we? The average human lives for 79 years, so as a 4-year-old, death was the farthest thing in my imagination. But that incident changed me, haunting me to this date about how fragile our existences are and how life can quickly be stolen from us through no fault of our own.

My parents later found that the driver of the other car died and was under the influence of alcohol. He was also found with an unfinished text message, suggesting that he was using his phone while driving. Despite being driven by my dad, a safe driver, my family was put at risk by another person’s reckless driving.

It is, thus, imperative to consider that irresponsible driving is not just harmful to oneself, but it is also harmful to others, in both physical and psychological aspects. The importance of drivers ed has positive externalities: it ensures that the driver is safe, the riders are safe, and people in other cars are safe.

Fortunately, new vehicle technology allows the integration of our phones with the car’s info-entertainment system via Bluetooth, significantly reducing the need to physically hold the phone and type into it. However, it is important to note that not everyone has access to said technology and considering that drivers ed has not standardized Bluetooth-equipped vehicles, it becomes essential to emphasize responsible driving in education. Furthermore, driving under the influence still remains a large problem that these high-tech cars do not solve. Most drivers do not fully understand that their irresponsible driving has consequences for third parties, and I believe that drivers ed should encapsulate the value of life and the repercussions of irresponsible driving at a greater extent than it currently does.

Being someone that has gone through a near-death experience because of someone else’s driving, I have never used a phone while driving and continuously implore my friends to follow suit. The mere fact that driving kills more Americans than certain wars is indicative of the need to reform drivers ed such that it places a greater value on life. The blurred line between life and death is a matter of training and education.