The school year is ending. College graduations are winding down, high school graduations will begin any week. This is also the season for automobile crashes, particularly among the high school set. As sure as caps and gowns, young people, in pairs and groups, will die in streambeds, along embankments and against trees.
I understand how it happens – it’s easy to be deluded into visions of invulnerability. The nights are warm and sweet, you’ve got a car and some money in your pocket. You feel slightly intoxicated, perhaps from alcohol, perhaps only from your recently-acquired sense of freedom.
So you get behind the wheel and you begin to push your luck, as well as your driving ability. You take your nerve and your judgement to their limits and then nudge them just a bit, out to a place faster and more reckless. After a few minutes, your heart stops pounding and you begin to think that perhaps this isn’t so reckless after all, so you begin to push it out just a bit more.
There are only two conclusions to this game. One is tragedy, the other is a near miss. There’s a narrow margin between maximum controllable speed and crashing. The lucky ones see it and pull back and live to tell about it. Years later, after having seen too often what can happen to people who push the laws of probability, I shake my head and wonder how it was I managed to come through unscathed. I like to think I’ve learned from those experiences, to curb my appetites, to find wisdom in moderation, to always make sure I leave a wide margin of safety.
A benefit of reckless teenage driving, should you survive it, is that it provides an apt metaphor for other situations in life for which sound judgment is required. The truth is, I started out thinking about teenagers and ended up thinking about the state of the world.
We are the teenagers behind the wheel, always pushing our excitement or our advantage a bit farther. A little more greenhouse gas, a million fewer trees, a few more endangered species – it’s only natural that I would think about the environment, but that’s not the only issue that fits the analogy.
As I was writing this, I kept being pulled away to read analyses of the on-going financial crisis in Asia. That car, so recklessly driven, is skidding out of control. It remains to be seen whether it will come to rest wrapped around a tree or merely in a ditch. Like a car crash, everything seems to be happening in slow motion. All the business analysts are telling us this Asian crisis was inevitable. I keep waiting to hear if a similar crisis for North America and Europe is also inevitable, but none of them are talking about that.
I turn the page of the newsmagazine and read about India and Pakistan driving too fast along the brink of nuclear arms and I’m reminded that my metaphor is all too fitting, especially when it comes to the innocent people who lose their lives to the reckless driver.
Turning another page, I see perhaps the most reckless drivers of all, the American politicians of both parties, selling our democratic process to purchase a few more weeks of privilege for themselves.
If I have any cause for hope, it is in the knowledge that adolescence, either of the individual or of the society, passes away. I just hope we live to see adulthood.
A Place Faster and More Reckless
The school year is ending. College graduations are winding down, high school graduations will begin any week. This is also the season for automobile crashes, particularly among the high school set. As sure as caps and gowns, young people, in pairs and groups, will die in streambeds, along embankments and against trees.
I understand how it happens – it’s easy to be deluded into visions of invulnerability. The nights are warm and sweet, you’ve got a car and some money in your pocket. You feel slightly intoxicated, perhaps from alcohol, perhaps only from your recently-acquired sense of freedom.
So you get behind the wheel and you begin to push your luck, as well as your driving ability. You take your nerve and your judgement to their limits and then nudge them just a bit, out to a place faster and more reckless. After a few minutes, your heart stops pounding and you begin to think that perhaps this isn’t so reckless after all, so you begin to push it out just a bit more.
There are only two conclusions to this game. One is tragedy, the other is a near miss. There’s a narrow margin between maximum controllable speed and crashing. The lucky ones see it and pull back and live to tell about it. Years later, after having seen too often what can happen to people who push the laws of probability, I shake my head and wonder how it was I managed to come through unscathed. I like to think I’ve learned from those experiences, to curb my appetites, to find wisdom in moderation, to always make sure I leave a wide margin of safety.
A benefit of reckless teenage driving, should you survive it, is that it provides an apt metaphor for other situations in life for which sound judgment is required. The truth is, I started out thinking about teenagers and ended up thinking about the state of the world.
We are the teenagers behind the wheel, always pushing our excitement or our advantage a bit farther. A little more greenhouse gas, a million fewer trees, a few more endangered species – it’s only natural that I would think about the environment, but that’s not the only issue that fits the analogy.
As I was writing this, I kept being pulled away to read analyses of the on-going financial crisis in Asia. That car, so recklessly driven, is skidding out of control. It remains to be seen whether it will come to rest wrapped around a tree or merely in a ditch. Like a car crash, everything seems to be happening in slow motion. All the business analysts are telling us this Asian crisis was inevitable. I keep waiting to hear if a similar crisis for North America and Europe is also inevitable, but none of them are talking about that.
I turn the page of the newsmagazine and read about India and Pakistan driving too fast along the brink of nuclear arms and I’m reminded that my metaphor is all too fitting, especially when it comes to the innocent people who lose their lives to the reckless driver.
Turning another page, I see perhaps the most reckless drivers of all, the American politicians of both parties, selling our democratic process to purchase a few more weeks of privilege for themselves.
If I have any cause for hope, it is in the knowledge that adolescence, either of the individual or of the society, passes away. I just hope we live to see adulthood.