Name: Kayla Sweeney
From: Marysville , Ca
Votes: 0
On October 6, 2021, I was saved by god. It all started the summer of Junior year. My friends and I all had our licenses, and went on risky adventures daily. In our eyes, nothing could defeat us. Drinking and driving became something in our daily lives. We normalized the one thing Driver education highly encouraged us not to do. This was all true until October 6. Towards the end of summer, we were all at a party and the driver had been drinking. On any normal day, I would’ve gotten into that truck and gone home, but on this day something felt different. It felt wrong. I stayed back and went home with a sober driver instead. I don’t know why, I just did. Then at 12:27 in the morning I got a call from my boyfriend telling me they had crashed on the way home. After rolling the truck six times and hitting a telephone pole, three were severely injured, and one was thrown out of the truck and hospitalized for weeks. For him, he will never be able to walk the same again. This is when everything in our lives changed.
I remember doing driver education classes when I was 15. I remember everything I was taught. I remember the consequences, the risks, and the deaths it taught me about. For a while, I was very aware of all of this, but after about two years, as you can tell, my friends and I acted as if we didn’t retain any of this information. After the accident though, the importance of Driver education came back. There are more than 10,000 deaths from drinking and driving, 30,000 from distracted driving, and 3,600 from speeding each year. If everyone retained the information from driver education, imagine how many people would be saved each year. I personally believe that it saved my own life. With my knowledge of drinking and driving from it, I didn’t go into that vehicle that night.
In order to reduce the number of deaths while driving, driver education needs to be revisited once a year. I believe this should be a requirement because after about a year, the realization of the information fades. It’s meant to scare you a little bit in order to stop you from doing the things that could later kill you. By revisiting it every year, you will constantly know the consequences of your actions. Another step we can take in order to reduce the number of deaths in vehicles is to only have self-driving cars. Some people are scared of this futuristic idea, but I definitely see it as a positive impact. If we could all have self driving cars, there would be no speeding, drinking driving, or distracted driving. So many simple driving errors would be solved and everyone would be so much safer. Even though these are both very good ideas that would really work, they are out of my control.
Some things that I can personally do to help is help spread awareness about the severity of breaking the laws while driving and to really listen to driver education. I am really into social media and I try to remind everyone about the tragic accident my friends were a part of every year in order to spread awareness about drinking and driving. In the future, I really want to create a platform that is way larger in order to help save more and more lives. The fact that people die because of driving breaks my heart, and I want to help with that as much as I can. Not only will I encourage others to follow the rules of driver education, but I will make sure and promise that I will follow them myself. By doing this, there is no chance that I can add to that statistic.
Driving is a privilege, not a right. There are very few rules that we as citizens need to follow, and I want to make it my mission to spread this message. There is absolutely no reason why anyone should end their life because they drank a few beers, were texting their best friend, or going above the speed limit because they were late to work. These harmless reasons should never be the reason. If we revisited driver education, had more self-driving cars, and spread more awareness, thousands of lives could be saved every single year.
