Caught this on All Things Considered yesterday. I want to examine the heart of the story, a real cautionary tale about 19-year-old Brandi Terry:
Terry had run a red light. Police checked her phone and discovered she had sent a text within seconds of the accident. Terry shattered her right ankle and broke her upper right arm in half. She couldn’t walk for six months and had an agonizing recovery.
Makes you remember how important it is to get driving right, doesn’t it? Brandi was very lucky not to have died in that crash; one would hope that she learns from the incident.
She got better, got another car and tried to stop texting.
Got another car? What’s this?
I could talk about the obvious problems attendant with texting while driving but I don’t want to. There’s a much larger disaster waiting undiscussed in the background here. The article doesn’t mention it, but I’m assuming she didn’t go down to the car farm and pick out a free car with free car insurance (especially not after totalling her last one by running a stop sign!). No way. It’s almost certain that her parents were morally and mentally deficient enough to buy their idiot daughter another car and to let her keep her cell phone! I say mentally deficient because of the obviously poor risk assessment they exercised. I make the moral judgement based on their glaring delinquency in disciplining their child. It’s wonderful that she survived, and I’m sure the injuries and recovery were a grueling punishment, but how can you cave in like that? You’re failing in your duty to protect her and you’re putting other people in harm’s way by putting her back on the road.
So rather than fulfilling their parental duty and administering some loving correction with a figurative two-by-four, Mommy and Daddy took the low road and satisfied their little Princess’s every whim. The results were depressingly predictable:
Within a year of her first accident, Terry did it again — she slammed into the back of semi while she was texting. This time, she escaped injury.
Same article, different section:
School’s out in Salt Lake City, and Pree Tautelli and Brittany Lui and their friends are piling into a Mini Cooper. They didn’t like the thought that their parents would have a device in their car to block calls and texts.
“I love texting and driving; it’s the in thing,” Tautelli says. “Everyone does it — who doesn’t?”
Well, I don’t. I actually would like to survive my trip. But let’s get back to the point. Kids, parents are meant to be unpopular dictators. Our whims are your laws; you don’t have to like them. That may seem to run counter to my libertarianism, but let’s not forget that children are dependents and reliant on us for moral instruction. If you have kids, please love them enough to be firm with them. If you do it right, they’ll get it someday.
