Drinking And Driving Paper
Drinking and Driving
Putting the rope around your neck
(or the handcuffs on your wrists)
By eRnie Prencke
For Dr. M. Coon’s Public Speaking Class
Middle Georgia College
Cochran – 2005
In Colombia twenty one persons die every day; there are 7579 fatal victims every year, one hundred thousand injured persons, and thousands whose lives, families and friendships end up torn after terrible traffic accidents. The economical loses of chaotic traffic, and traffic accidents easily go over U$ 10 BN every year, and the problem doesn’t get any better.
It is like if a passenger aircraft crashed every week killing one hundred and forty people every time, and if so, people wouldn’t be so “cool” about it, authorities would probably take a lot more security measures.
This doesn’t happen with MVA’s (Motor Vehicle Accidents), maybe because deaths occur in small numbers, one, two, three, in the most extreme and outrageous, and unbelievable case, four. These deaths are considered distant events, things that wouldn’t happen to ME, errors made by OTHER “stupid” people; it is very hard for one to imagine that one is going to be involved in a MVA after turning the ignition, everything in our own happy worlds is perfect, until we collide with reality (or a streetlamp).
Our attitude towards these doesn’t help either, since people are always looking for the external causes of the accident, such as: a hole in the pavement, wrongfully designed roads (sometimes happens, you would be surprised of what you can find in poor third world countries), bad tires, wrongfully designed suspension in the cars (remember the Ford Explorer problem?) and any other of the twenty five hundred parts a car has, but no one ever focuses on the driver, on the moment of the accident all excuses, and errors are focused on “OTHERS”, no one ever wants to take...
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