Ruminations

Blog dedicated primarily to randomly selected news items; comments reflecting personal perceptions

Monday, November 20, 2006

The Right to Drive

No kidding, it's downright scary. People have been behind the wheel of a car all of their adult life. Then, when they become really "adult", in the very senior sense, when their responses, attention span, eyesight become truly compromised they pay no mind, and simply go on doing what they've always been accustomed to. They may have been fairly good drivers at one time, but as their health lapsed, so did their skills. They may have been abysmal drivers, but got along anyway, and their skills deteriorated even further.

Why the hell can't people police themselves, why cannot they understand they have an obligation to do so, not only for their own well-being but for the safety of the rest of us? Myopia of the self-entitled. They'd be the first to deny the privilege of driving to anyone whose skill levels had deteriorated to the point where they feel threatened, but seem unable to recognize the impact of their own inability to perform in road safety when others are concerned.

I had my own little taste of this conundrum. We'd parked in a lot adjacent to where I regularly do my food shopping, remarking as we parked at the seldom-experienced fact that the parking lot was fairly empty. So empty in fact, that we parked beside the sole car on that particular parking lane - all other parking spaces were free of cars. We each opened a car door - front and back - on the free side to extricate our little dogs from the car interior.

As I picked up one of our little dogs and then backed out of the car with it, I felt a sudden shock as my body came up hard against a large immovable object. Frightened and startled I turned to see a car sliding into the parking spot directly beside ours; its driver, unperturbed, continued to park his car. An elderly couple disembarked and I asked the driver whether he was blind or merely stupid. He barked right back at me that it was my fault: I had backed into his car.

Incredulous, I pointed out that a soft body is no competition for the destructive potential of a vehicle, especially one driven by an idiot. My husband was angry and told the man, revealed to be grey, wrinkled and infirm that he shouldn't be driving, he was a threat to everyone else behind the wheel of a car. In response the man yelled that if my husband had half a brain he would see that his wife was blind.

Blind? My husband retorted, you were behind the wheel, not your wife. Yet, looking at the man, my husband felt a pang of sympathy for the old dolt. Not I. I turned to his wife and told her that it is her choice to drive with someone whose driving habits could imperil her life, but she should not be a party to unleashing his obvious incapacity to operate a vehicle on the rest of society.

Had the man apologized I'd never have felt so outraged. Then I heard on the evening news about the elderly man who drove his vehicle into a crowd of shoppers at a market in California, killing a number of people, injuring many. When he emerged from his car he berated the crowd, asking why they hadn't got out of the way. He's 81 years old now, three years post-accident, was sentenced to six months of house probation, too old, too ill to be sent to prison where, the judge lamented, he would most surely die.

Big loss. Anyone who cannot take ownership of their responsibility to others is no credit to himself, no loss to society.

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