Texting While Driving

While I was reading through the third issue of this year's Collegian one article in particular caught my attention. The title read, "Anti-texting film worth viewing." The article provided the link to the film so I watched it. It was a lot more gory than I thought it'd be and was a little horrific to actually watch a car crash like I was witnessing it firsthand.

My senior year in high school when I was driving to school I actually was run off the road by a girl who was texting. She pulled into my lane and didn't even realize it. I was driving on the shoulder until the truck that had been behind me slowed down to let me back into the lane. The girl texting barely noticed the light she was approaching was red.

Also during my senior year, as my mom was driving me and my friends home from school, we came to a closed lane so we had to come to a stop in order to merge into the traffic in the left lane. There was a car behind us and when my sister turned around she noticed that it wasn't slowing down and panicked. We simultaneously heard her scream and felt the impact of their car going over 40 mph slamming into our stopped car. The wreck was disastrous. The car that hit us had 4 students in the car and 3 of them got injured (they even had to pull one girl out of the car because she couldn't move). Our car had 6 people and there were no serious injuries except a torn ligament in my neck and a sprain in my friend's neck. Both cars were totaled. We soon came to find out that the reason the car behind us didn't see the lane suddenly end was because the driver was searching for his phone on which he had just received a text. The text was more important than the lives of those in his car and everybody around him.

It's very unfair to endanger the lives of others just because you want to find out what time your friend wants you to come over later that night or where you're meeting someone for lunch. If it's an emergency it's not too hard to pull into a parking lot and either text the person then or call them. We have enough distractions around us in the car as it is...rolling down the windows, listening to and singing along with the radio, adjusting the air conditioning. Do we really need another unnecessary distraction? I don't.