Driving is a privilege

My mom always swore she had psychic powers. She told me she could feel when things were coming, when things didn’t feel right, she felt energy in everything, and she was so confident in her “power”. I was hesitant to believe her since I’ve never been a strong believer of the supernatural and so I decided to ask her why she felt so confident in her abilities. She began with telling me small things, like how she always seemed to get déjà vu and how she felt like she knew what was coming. This didn’t sound very special to me, I mean isn’t déjà vu one of the most common feelings we seem to have nowadays? I was going to ask her to clarify a bit more until she started telling me the story about her parents.

One night she dreamed of her parents climbing into their car and hoping onto the highway. She said she seemed to follow them throughout their journey, as if watching over them for something. She said as they continued down the highway they crashed. For the rest of the dream, she was picking up pieces of her parents’ dead bodies up from that same highway, with nobody helping her or her other siblings as they pleaded to passing cars. My mom woke up the next day with an intense feeling of dread, and she tried everything to stop her parents from going out that day. My mother said she even went as far as to hiding the keys to their car, until they unfortunately found the keys and left. They were killed later that night because of a drunk driver racing down a residential area. My mom was 20 at the time, she also happened to be the oldest sibling out of 4 other kids. Because of this drunk driver. My mom was forced to take care of her siblings and lose out on her early adulthood.

I have pledged from that day forward that I would be a safe driver, as I never wanted somebody else to have to go through what my mother did. Everyday when I turn on my car I am reminded of my mom’s story, and I do everything I can to make sure anything like that from ever happening. I have never even taken a call in my car, and everybody knowns the car won’t move until all seatbelts are on. I am not the only person driving though, and I have seen so many reckless drivers in the short amount of time that I’ve had my license. Seeing people only think about themselves while driving is sad because people shouldn’t be this ignorant of what their driving can do. Driver education is a very important factor in getting less people to die each year because of car accidents. Driving is a privilege that we are all lucky to have, and people need to be aware of the impact they can cause while they are driving. We can change lives in an instant while driving, and reckless driving should not be as common as it is.

One thing we can do to educate drivers better is to change how we teach people to drive. Drivers need to be taught a defensive approach at driving. If we teach people to force others to adapt to their driving, there will be a lot of drivers that are all fighting to do their own thing and waiting for the others to adapt. Defensive driving teaches drivers instead to pay attention to their surroundings and to the other drivers. As a defensive driver, you think about how your driving will affect others around you as well. We can also do other things to promote better driving education. For instance, instead of encouraging speeding up when you see yellow lights, we need to teach more patience to prevent bad road rage. By teaching people how to be safe and by showing how much they can impact others with their driving, they will be better educated drivers which will prevent the great number of deaths in the United States due to car accidents.

Nobody should have to go through losing somebody they love due to reckless drivers. We never know if or when we’ll have a car wreck or when it could happen to our partners, our siblings, or even to our own parents. As cautious as you might be at driving, one person can completely change your life in an instant if they are being a dangerous driver, and people shouldn’t live in fear of driving because of some uneducated people. Even though my mom’s story did made me believe her a bit more, I can’t help but think how better things could have gone for her if that driver wasn’t there that day.