The Power of a Text

4,000 pounds of steel at 65 miles per hour, the same momentum as falling from a 12-story building onto the concrete below. Broken bones are the best you could hope for. Maybe you weren’t even the one on your phone. Perhaps someone else was texting their mom back, and you paid the price. Surrounded on all sides, all you could do was keep going straight. Swerving would endanger everyone else around you as well. So you take the brunt of the blow, and everything you worked for, and everyone else in the car will never be the same.

Maybe it was you. A notification from your phone caught your attention. A quick 3-second glance to skim over it.  In this time, you have traveled the length of a football field and hoped nothing changed. Hoping everything would be the same as when you looked down.

This isn’t “looking away”; this is driving completely blind.

  Just because the impact wasn’t as complicated as you thought it would be, there could also be internal damage to you and the car. If you hit the right spot, your car could be in flames in seconds. If that does not happen, your organs do not stop moving once the impact ends, making internal bleeding an extremely high possibility.

  Yet, we normalize this. Accidents happen all the time; they don’t really matter, we say. Around the world, about 1.19 million people are killed annually in accidents. At this point, can you even call it an accident, though? You were taught from a young age not to drive distracted. You are aware of the possible consequences. You knew the chances of fatality when you stepped into your car. Yet you still went. Still checked your phone. Still chose to take your eyes off the road. If you really think about it, the choice was intentional and the consequences ignored.