Pay attention! Please.
That’s what I wanted to say to a fellow driver last week,
whose lack of attention could have injured or killed her self, her middle
school daughter, a delivery van driver, and me.
The story: I’m slowing my car, signaling to take a left into the church
parking lot. She is right behind me, crosses
a double yellow line in her car to pass me on my left, placing herself squarely in the path of an oncoming delivery
truck. She clips the front of the truck with a “BANG!”, swerves back in front
of me, her car finally coming to rest by the side of the road. Truck and driver
are ok, and me too.
I quickly pull over, run to her smoking and smashed car, its
front end ripped apart and sticking out in jagged edges. The windshield is smashed. Her passenger wails in fear. And although the
first thing I say is, “Are you both ok?”(they are), what I really want to ask
is: “Were you actually paying attention to what you were doing?”
We have an innocuous phrase now for this increasingly common
form of vehicular attention deficit disorder: distracted driving. Sounds
so benign, like it’s just an annoyance, a harmless habit. Yet this dangerous,
clueless, stupid driving is more and more the norm on our roads and byways. I especially
noticed it this summer while out on my bicycle.
Tooling around on a twenty pound vehicle that can be crushed in a
microsecond by a two ton behemoth, tends to focus one’s attention. So I’d roll
up beside a minivan or a pick up truck, stop at an intersection across from a
tractor trailer and then try to get the attention of those drivers so they’d actually
see me on the road.
Instead, with one hand casually gripping the wheel, so many
drivers were looking down to send a text or read a text, or pushing a phone
against their ears while blabbing away, or doing their make-up or eating a
burger or slurping from an oversized coffee cup, anything but actually paying
attention. This was the norm in half of the vehicles I came upon, sometimes
more. The only thing which seems to save
me these days as I venture out on two wheels is a very loud voice as I shout: “I
AM HERE!!!! Hey! HEY!!!”. Then I pray I am heard, that attention is paid.
Yes—I too am guilty of this vehicular lack of attention at
times. We are all are these days, as we
drive. Can’t let go of our phones in the
car, not for a moment. We drive cars that are now more distracting than ever
before too. My little Honda can send and
receive voice texts and phone calls, though most of the time all I do is yell
at the dashboard, to no effect. This
would be comical if it weren’t so deadly.
Distracted driving killed 3,154 people in the United States
in 2013, and injured 424,000. According
to distraction.gov, the federal government site which tracks such sobering
statistics, at any given moment 660,000 drivers are driving distracted. Put your head down for just five seconds to
read that text about your fantasy football league or the latest tweet from Kim
Kardashian and at 55 miles per hour, you’ve traveled 100 yards, without ever
paying attention.
I love my phone. We
all do. It connects us instantly. It
satiates our need for stimulation. It’s fun and convenient and most of us
cannot imagine life without it anymore. Yet our addiction to screen time is
literally killing our ability to pay attention and not just behind the wheel
but in the rest of life too. A May 2015 study by Microsoft Corporation found
that we wired humans now have a shorter attention span than a goldfish. Homo
sapiens pay attention for just 8 seconds on average, while our finned friends
clock in at 9 seconds. Maybe they should be driving our cars.
So imagine this, before you pick up the phone to text a
friend or play with your I-Tunes or answer a call, all while flying down the
road. Your split second addiction to
staying connected could kill someone. Maim
for life your loved one. Could kill you, all in a heartbeat. Is it really worth it to take that risk?
So please: when you get behind the wheel--just pay
attention.
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