Distracted to Death

You never even saw me.

You never saw my vehicle.

You never heard my horn, paid no attention to my hand signals that hardly represented a friendly greeting.

I know this because you never looked up.

Never raised your eyes from what was in your right hand and which had your full attention.

This seemed somewhat strange because you were behind the wheel of a car, a 3,000 pound missile as you raced through town on Highway 98 last week.

More amazing was that your eyes were never raised from whatever was in your hand even as you crossed the yellow line that divided us on the highway, not once, but twice.

Not a blink was apparent as you nearly cut me off to the point of collision.

You were in your own world and that world did not involve the road or your car or any other vehicle in your path or which might enter your path.

And the beauty of driving a van, I have found, is that many vehicles, cars, are sitting lower in the road than mine and that can offer a perfect viewpoint.

Of the cell phone and text pad in your hand and your digits frantically worked the keys and your mouth moved to speak to some disembodied voice.

You were, in essence the research tells us, driving drunk. In the middle of the day, the lunch hour to be exact, but your distraction was the equivalent of driving after consuming sufficient alcohol to be considered driving while impaired.

Apparently that didn’t matter. You surely cared nothing about those sharing the road with you, but you certainly were oblivious to your own safety.

And judging by a guesstimate of your age, you were either absent, asleep or distracted recently when the Media Guy came to Port St. Joe and provided presentations to elementary, middle and high school students.

The high school presentation should have been enough for that driver to put the cell phone away and keep it away, locked in the trunk if need be.

Media Guy’s presentation was all about choices, about making the right choices in life, at crucial junctures in life, in order to prevent pain, to prevent permanent injury, to prevent death.

The most troubling of those choices detailed in the presentation was that to text, call or speak on the phone while driving.

The incident detailed in the presentation was based on a true story in which three young women leave an event and head out on the highway in a jovial mood.

The driver, however, decides at one point to contact one of her friends and out comes the phone and several minutes later the driver, not paying attention, comes crashing into reality in the form of another vehicle.

One of her friends is killed, another permanently injured. The driver of the other car, innocently going about their day, is also seriously injured.

And all the young lady at the wheel can do is cry, knowing tears will change nothing, will not bring back those minutes before the accident when she had another choice to make.

The statistics are astounding – more than 6,000 deaths and 500,000 serious injuries each year can be traced to accidents that are caused by a driver distracted by talking or texting on the phone.

Now I have never liked cell phones.

I only have one because of this job and I have come to understand that it can be a handy safety device in the event of a problem on the roadway.

My wife lives and sleeps a bit easier knowing the phone is in my pocket.

But call me while I’m driving, forget about getting an answer.

Ask me to text a message, well, heck, I haven’t even mastered that task. Too much hand-eye coordination required.

But as more and more of us have purchased cell phones, learned to text, become more social animals courtesy of the ether, we have become detached from the ordinary tasks of life.

I remember as a young student driver the constant emphasis on making me understand the perils of a car, of keeping the 10-2 o’clock on the steering wheel, using the mirrors for awareness of all about you and knowing that even with all those mirrors there was still a blind spot.

But now we produce drivers – as the stock car races from the parking lots of either Port St. Joe High School or Wewahitchka High School at the end of the school day attest – who have more important things on their mind, or as the Media Guy suggested in presentation, believe themselves so bulletproof that nothing amiss could possibly happen while behind the wheel.

And, unfortunately, too many adults seem of a same mentality, that the phone call, the text message is somehow too important to wait until they are off the road.

That, folks, means we are all playing a form of Russian Roulette, many of us without even knowing it, every time we leave our driveway.

I know this because you never even saw me, even as you nearly ran me off the road for the sake of that text.