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Originally Posted by blizzak
I guess i'm just tired of people calling everything an "accident" when most of it is easily avoidable. I think that probably about 90% of "accidents" could be avoided if people kept more space around their vehicle and slowed down a little. It's as if they're making a decision to drive bad, and i'd hardly consider that an accident. An accident is when you wet your bed because you can't subconsciously control your uterine muscles while you sleep, it's not when you hit someone from behind because you were driving too fast and didn't think your car would take that long to stop in bad weather.
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You're trying to redefine the terms to fit your argument.
That a person's negligence contributed to an accident doesn't prevent it from being an accident. That an accident was avoidable doesn't make it not an accident. That it was unplanned does.
Do you think the girl who hit you planned that? Do you think I planned to drive my car into a ravine and nearly kill myself in the process and leave myself with a partial disability as a result?
Everyone does foolish things while behind the wheel, gets distracted while changing the radio station or when a child in the back seat begins to cry or after having a bad day at work, or when misjudging whether we've had enough rest to drive.
It's the luck of the draw whether there happens to be, in my case, a guard rail next to an empty lot or an unguarded deep ravine. It's the luck of the draw whether there's another car approaching in the other lane when we hit a patch of black ice.
I'm not saying that talking on a cell phone or driving after drinking, or changing cd's or overdriving conditions shouldn't be condemned, and we shouldn't hold those who drive dangerously responsible for their carelessness. Of course we should. People should be educated about what safe driving is and isn't, should be trained in how to drive safely, and held accountable for their actions. Absolutely society should do those things.
When I was a teenager in the rural midwest, I lived in an area that had been thoroughly strip mined. There were "strip pits", pools of various sizes all over the place, all of them filled to different depths with water year round. Sometimes the larger ones were stocked with fish and used as fishing holes.
On four different occasions while I was in high school, someone driving on narrow, rural, unlit roads in deep fog drove their car down a boat-loading ramp and into the water of a strip pit. In one case, it was a couple on their way home from the prom, a seventeen-year-old-boy and his 15-year-old-date, and they both drowned. Was the boy responsible for his own death and that of his girlfriend? Of course, he was at least partially responsible, but the consequences of his actions greatly outweighed whatever he deserved as a result of his foolish driving in those conditions. That he did something foolish in no way means that this isn't a catastrophe for both of the kids involved, their families, their friends, and the community that lost them.
We can teach safe driving, educate people about dangerous driving practices such as cell phones and driving drunk and overdriving conditions, and apply appropriate penalties for those actions while at the same time recognizing that they're not doing these things on purpose, that the loss of good people to poor decisions is a loss nonetheless.
Gilda