The National Distracted Driving Summit was held in Washington, D.C. this week. In a speech today, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said, “Texting, using hand-held and hands-free cell phones, talking to passengers, and even programming your GPS while driving can be life-threatening distractions on the road.”
Senator Charles Schumer of New York also spoke, urging the administration to support his ALERT driving bill – Avoiding Life Endangering and Reckless Texting.
I have a couple of questions for Mr. LaHood. Since he’s concerned about driver distraction occurring during a simple conversation with passengers, I’d like to know how he feels about talking your four-year-old son through the process of peeing into a McDonald’s milk carton while hurling a Honda minivan down an empty stretch of highway.
Or how about this? A small voice in the backseat of the brand-new BMW announces, “I have to throw up right now – bleeech.” Does that qualify as driver distraction, and should the administration be considering a bill to ban underage automobile barfing?
I’d like to suggest a couple of bills an ambitious senator could introduce as legislation. For starters, let’s try SWIFT – a ban on Spanking While In Fast Traffic. I’ve done it, attempting to swat at someone in the back seat while negotiating a hairpin turn. It’s as effective as a hands-free cell phone is in getting the message across.
There ought to be a FART bill passed, a ban on Fighting And Riding Together. I’ve witnessed some serious swerving going on in automobiles, and it’s usually quite obvious that the occupants are fighting. In some instances, they’re doing something else they shouldn’t be doing in the car. The acronym for that activity could remain the same -- Fondling And Riding Together.
Movie’s Over – Van’s Endangered: this bill, MOVE, actually makes it a crime for a parent to allow a movie playing in the vehicle to run out while the vehicle is in drive. A parent must anticipate the end of a movie and stop to change the movie well before all hell breaks loose in said vehicle.
A few years ago, I rode from St. Augustine, Florida, to Atlanta with my sister and her four preschool-aged children. The twins were in the very back seat of her Ford Excursion, and the two younger children were in the middle row, all buckled into their massive car seats with an empty seat separating them. I happened to glance back at the twins just in time to see Faith bend over the side of her car seat and reach down to grab something. And then, without warning, and certainly without provocation, she lifted a stick into the air and smacked her twin, Grace, across the top of the head with it.
“Hey! What are you doing?” I yelled at Faith, just as Grace let out a hideous wail. “She just picked up a stick and hauled off an hit Grace with it,” I reported to my sister.
“Where did she get a stick?” she asked. Then, “Faith, where did you get that stick?”
“In Grammy’s yard,” Faith admitted in a tiny voice. She had actually smuggled a large stick from my mother's yard into the car and kept it hidden for four hours, waiting for the perfect moment to beat the crap out of her sister.
“Why did you hit your sister?” Holly demanded.
“I don’t know.”
Holly and I debated for just a second on what to do. Should she wait until they got home to discipline Faith? There was no good place to get off the Interstate, so the safest thing would be to wait, we decided.
Then the two began struggling over the stick. Someone was going to end up bloody if we waited to do something. Holly pulled over onto the median, put the car into park, and then looked around for something to use as a paddle.
“Use the stick,” I suggested.
“It’s too big. It might really hurt them,” she said, hesitating.
Here,” I said, pulling off my flipflop and handing it to her.
She climbed into the back of that monster truck, pulled Faith out of her car seat, and used my all-time favorite flipflop to mete out punishment. Then she confiscated the stick. The rest of the trip, any time a kid let out a squeak, she held up the stick and said, “I’ll use this on you next time.”
When we got home, I stepped out of that Excursion and turned my ankle, causing the strap on the world's greatest flipflop to snap. Faith saw it happen. She grinned, picked up the stick that her mother had thrown into the yard, and carried it into the house.
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