A Tragedy Compounded

Recently, a local teenage girl was killed. She was driving a car. She had her license for less than a year. She was speeding, something she was known for among her friends. She was text messaging on her phone. She was not wearing her seat belt.

When the speeding car began to drift, she did not notice because her attention was on the phone. When she noticed, she overcompensated, and the car flipped over two complete times before landing on its wheels. The driver was dead. The passenger, another young girl, survived with minor injuries. She was wearing her seat belt.

There has been the usual wailing and sorrow around our community. The school and the media all have been properly somber. There was a memorial at the school. The wake was attended by a lot of people. They've posted pictures on one wall at the school.

And yet, not once has either the school or the family done the one thing that at least would have given her untimely death some meaning, the act that would have been more of a tribute to this child than all of the flowers and keepsakes that litter the side of the road where she died.

Nobody has come forward and talked to her friends, or the school population in general, about the dangers of not wearing a seat belt, the dangers of dividing your attention between driving and text messaging, and the dangers of speeding.

I am not one of those who is all bent out of shape over talking on a cell phone while driving. If you use a hands-free headset, it’s exactly the same as talking to someone in the car. The danger is when you have to use one hand to hold the phone. Or worse, to dial or type messages.

However, I am one of those who gets bent out of shape over not wearing a seat belt. Only the foolish drive without them today, after all the information we have, and all the attention it’s gotten. If nothing else, you wear them to avoid unnecessary tickets.

I won’t go into the speeding and inexperience part much, other than to say it’s rampant in our community, as it probably is in every community, especially among the young. Around 3 pm everyday, our high school parking lot resembles Talladega, with rushing cars trying to go four wide in a two lane area. Young drivers, generally speaking, have no concept of right-of-way, and they have no respect for the awesome danger that a huge piece of metal can present. To most young drivers, it’s a cool way to move around really, really fast with your friends all yapping away, and the humongous speakers spitting out ear-shattering bass notes rendering the rest of the song unintelligible.

It was a sad thing that this girl died young. It’s sadder still that no one will try to save other kids from repeating her tragic mistakes.