Careless Drivers and Dangerous Mistakes.

Careless drivers, I hope you never meet one. Today while listening to the news, they ran a story about a guy doing 160 km on a 100 km highway, if that wasn't careless enough, he had taped a screen to his dashboard so that he could watch a movie while driving. Beyond stupid, I don't care if he hurts himself, it's some poor innocent person who always ends up paying for an idiot's mistake. .......'.................................... I wanted to blog about this because of something that happened last Wednesday. While driving to pick up some items, a small van suddenly lost control in front of me as it took a sharp corner. In a split second it crossed over a passing lane and into the oncoming lane, smashed into a guardrail and bounce back, which was lucky because if it broke through, it would have gone over a cliff and into a river. ............................................ Fortunately the young woman and baby in the back were not hurt. It was a miracle that there was no oncoming traffic at that moment. The side of the van was badly damaged, tires flat, rims crushed. The thing that upset me about this is she said that while driving, the baby started to fuss (kid was almost two) when she entered the curve at high speed, she turns around to see why the kid is squawking (it's what kids do) and so she loses control of the van. Let the kid whine, when you are entering a sharp turn, hang onto the flipping wheel! It was real life not a video game where you can put the console down. She kept rolling her eyes as if the accident inconvenienced her, the way she was on the cell made me wonder if maybe it wasn't the baby but rather texting and driving. The final straw for me was when she said that she has already been in three accidents this year, "but none of them were my fault", I wouldn't place a bet on that. .............................................. Later that evening, I realized everyone was in the right place at the right time. Meaning if some family was driving in the opposite lane, she would have hit them head on and it would have been disastrous, or if she hit the guardrail in a weak spot and plunged into the river, or if she met one of the many transport trucks that use the highway, or or or. It's the area I grew up in, it could have been someone I know. One careless moment on her part and people could have died. Even me, to have watched her baby get killed, innocent people on their way home get killed, it would be a memory that would haunt me at every Christmas. People are people and there is probably not much we can do about it, I just needed to get the thoughts out of my mind, they have been racing around and around all week, what if, what if.