Look Both Ways

Jake
Seymore

5
May 2020

Look
Both Ways

There
is a visceral feeling when someone dies. Looking into the open
casket, peering upon a plastic corpse. It brings about an unrelenting
feeling of existential dread. Death is hard to handle for some
people. The sad thing about this is that it’s a very real reality
for the majority of people, almost daily. So when considering this,
one must take the necessary precautions to ensure that they are kept
safe.

The
first step is mandating that more drivers understand the importance
of drivers ed, not only for their own safety, but for the
other members on the road. When a person knows to not drive while
inebriated, to look both ways, to use their signal, to check their
blind spots, to overall exemplify the main precautions taught to be
taken while driving, they’re preventing death in the very sense of
the term. So one could argue, the best possible way to reduce the
number of deaths on the road would be to simply make sure those who
do drive understand the importance of what is exactly at risk here.
Let’s say they sideswipe a minivan with a mom and a baby while
going 80 miles per hour in a school zone. Imagine, the mom and kid
live, but possibly with life altering disabilities. Or the mom dies
and the kid is left to grow up without a mother to nurture them and
take care of them. Or maybe the kid dies, and the mother has to
attend the funeral for her three year old child. What if they’re as
gone as gone gets? The fault lies solely on the driver here. Audacity
plays a large part in driving, and some don’t understand that, even
after they know what is at stake.

Personally,
there are days where it is apparent, even in my own life. I have
friends who drive like morons, I’ve had friends get into car
wrecks, and quite frankly, just by knowing them, I can see it clear
as day that they don’t fully understand the depth of what one wrong
move can mean on the road. It could mean their life, and then no one
would be there to answer for their mistakes. Or they themselves could
kill someone, which in the same turn would ensure their arrest and a
large portion, if not the entirety, of their life spent in prison.
And not just the physical cell bars themselves, but the prison of the
mind. The guilt of having that blood on their hands would certainly
lead them to the brink of collapse.

Death
is nothing to be taken lightly. Once a person dies, there is no
coming back. For someone to die in such a preventable way, something
basic driving education could have halted, is truly a sad sight to
see. There is no changing the past and those who have died in car
accidents, but the future is hopeful, so as long as the people are
willing to change it for the better.