Worth the Wait

Worth the wait

Zoie Martin

June 15th, 2020

Rainy night, a slippery street full of stopped cars, waiting for a signal to go; but she still decides to look, to take a simple peek at her phone. In an instant it’s over, smashes into the car in front of her, airbags coming at her at full force. And why did this all happen? Just to respond to a quick text message that could have been answered five minutes later. This is us. This is the society we live in, our number one priority is responding to that message, answering that call, or “snap chatting” that friend back. No one realizes the impact it has until it’s almost all gone, exactly how it was for me. My name is Zoie Martin and I was hit fatality in a car accident just so the girl could “check her phone.”

I’m here to tell you it isn’t worth it. Waiting that five or ten minutes is worth the damage you could do in an instant. Texting and driving is one of the most irresponsible things to do and I’m here to inform you that it is worth the wait.

1.6 million. That’s the amount of people in an accident due to a phone. One in four accidents- over three hundred thousand people injured a year because of it. And this is all our own doing, when this happens there’s no one else in the world that could ever be blamed but yourself. You must now hold the baggage of infecting someone else’s life, changing their world completely, just to stay connected in that instance.

On teendrivingsource.org it states that brain activity is reduced 37% due to looking at a phone while driving. This takes away more than a third of brain activity that should be used to focus on the road. Thus proving how much texting and driving limits you from being able to focus and drive to your full potential.

Knowing the amount of damage it can cause, what can you personally do to lower that statistic?

Well the obvious answer is, stay off your phone while in the car. This can be done through implementing apps when driving that don’t allow you to contact others or go on your phone or by enabling “do not disturb” while driving. To be even safer, you could put your phone in a place where you can’t reach it or see the screen to completely limit the temptation all together.

If the girl that hit me didn’t respond to this temptation, I wonder how different my life would be: still would be running track, working my daycare job, wouldn’t have missed weeks of school… Once it’s put into perspective you realize just how much your phone can wait.

It was a rainy night, the slippery street was full of stopped cars and instead of looking at her phone, she waited five minutes til she got home.

“Cell Phones.” Teen Driver Source, 2020, www.teendriversource.org/teen-crash-risks-prevention/distracted-driving/cell-phones.