Car Accident

My wife and I used to live in Southern Maryland, just below Washington D.C. The traffic doesn't get worse than it does there. I was almost killed dozens of times by crazy drivers, yet somehow we went six years without any sort of collision. I used to tell my wife if we lived there long enough we were eventually going to get killed in an accident. It seemed inevitable. In the short time we were there, I knew of a few people who were either seriously hurt in accident or who had died. My wife, a teacher, had former students who had been hurt badly because of accidents.

So we come to New York to have a child and build a family, and of course, after having my daughter, it's here that I'm in my first ever car accident. It wasn't horribly serious. A very dumb driver without much for brains decided to drive in reverse in a parking lot without looking. She slammed into us, just as we started to back out of the car. The car doesn't look so good. It looks like I was in a much more serious accident, but the three of us are all fine.

I had a screaming baby in the car, while I yell at this woman for being too stupid to look where she's going. Then we exchange insurance. And the entire time, my Baby J. is crying in the back seat, and I have a terrible case of nerves. I know everything is ok, but it so easily could have been worse. I'm thinking the whole time how badly I'd like to smack people in the face because they're so apathetic these days. The woman admits it's her fault, but she isn't upset. She's the picture of calm. She doesn't get it. She insists she has kids too so she knows. But she doesn't. People stopped caring. You can tell. If she cared, she would look when she's driving. If she cared she would realize that her huge, bulky SUV that makes her feel so safe is a huge weapon.

It makes me never want to take Baby J. out again. I wish everyone drove around in tin cans on wheels, because they'd be better drivers then. People think they're so safe in their huge cars and trucks that they never consider other drivers anymore. This woman was all of 5' 2" driving in an SUV twice the size of my car, who probably could barely see over the dashboard. I doubt she ever looks. I bet she just assumes the odds are in her favor. She's driving a tank afterall, what's the worst that could happen? But people in these huge SUVs need to realize that someone in a car, like myself, who is hit by one of them has double the chance of dying than if I were hit by someone in another car. If these people were running around with loaded guns, would they be careful enough not to aim that at other people? Would they know enough to look where they were going and who they were pointing at? Probably. But people never give their two tonne tanks the same consideration when they're driving.

It makes me so angry. You never know who's in that other car. You don't know who is out there, who you might hit. Have people stopped caring about the other drivers?

D.