My latest column — about beauty standards — is in print tomorrow and online now. Click here to read it.
Accidents.
A few months ago, I drove south on US 19 in Spring Hill, Fla. on my way to work. At the intersection at the county line, flashing lights from squad cars and fire trucks forced all southbound drivers to merge to the right. The traffic light turned red, so I had a minute to look for whatever it was on the left that required the presence of the emergency responders.
First, I saw the motorcycle. Then, I saw the body.
Upon my arrival at work, where my colleagues pursued the story, I learned a young woman in a red truck had run the light, killing the motorcyclist as he crossed the intersection. She did it after escaping arrest for driving while intoxicated and dragging a deputy (who’d jumped on to her truck to try to stop her) across 19’s northbound lanes as she sped away. The deputy survived. A mile or so north of the motorcycle crash scene, deputies caught the driver. She has been in jail ever since.
In a recorded jailhouse call between the driver and the father of her baby, she says some of the following, through tears:
“As far as the deputy, she jumped on the truck. It’s not like I hit her. She fell off. It was her decision to jump on the truck … what was I supposed to do?”
“I didn’t run (the motorcylist) over on purpose.”
“It was a car accident.”
Really? An accident?
Earlier this year, I interviewed Tom Vanderbilt — the brilliant author of the brilliant book Traffic — and in the essay about driving in which I quoted him, we came to the following conclusions:
Calling a crash an accident “implies there’s no way this could have been prevented, that it was unforeseeable,” Vanderbilt said. Phrases like “drunken-driving accident” are most egregious, he said.
The word “accident” enables negligent drivers. It lets a person create conditions in which vehicles are likely to collide and call it unpredictable after it happens.
The belief that it’s all right to call all car collisions “accidents” is not limited to the jailed driver from the crash scene I saw in May. Read a newspaper. Eavesdrop while you people watch. It comes up a lot. I am of the opinion that it has to stop.
When we call a crash an accident, we permit the person responsible for it to relinquish responsibility. We admit what happened is bad, but minimize the incident because — after all — the driver didn’t mean to.
What we don’t consider when we call crashes accidents is that premeditation is not a prerequisite for responsibility. You don’t have to plan out something for it to be your fault. But if we call crashes “accidents,” we perpetuate that belief, which lets a lot of bad decision makers off the hook. It becomes easy to live like “I didn’t mean to!” means “I’m not responsible!”
But when we call a crash what it is — a crash or a collision — it’s something worth dissecting. It’s something that, when dissected, is actually pretty predictable.
I am 100% certain the driver who ran the light that morning at County Line Road did not get in her truck that day with intentions to use it to kill someone. But she decided to use drugs. She decided to get in the car. She decided to escape police custody — after she was already in handcuffs — and flee in her truck. She decided to drive more than 70 miles per hour with a deputy hanging off her vehicle. She decided to blow a red light.
You can say the same about somebody who decides to text and drive. Somebody who decides to speed in the rain. To weave in and out of traffic. To dig through the console. To drive while you’re really, really tired.
When something happens while we do those things, it’s not an accident. It’s negligence.
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Click here to listen to listen to the driver’s jailhouse call and to read the story.
Integrity.
in·teg·ri·ty
noun/in?tegrit?/?
The quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness.
That’s how the dictionary defines integrity. But whenever it comes up in conversation, I tend to define it like this:
A person who has integrity lives his or her life like everything he or she ever does and says will be dug up by a good newspaper reporter, unexpectedly. He or she simply doesn’t do or say anything that he or she would not be able to explain — NAY — defend if the thing done or said were, in fact, exposed. He or she doesn’t do or say things privately that are inconsistent with his or her public image. He or she doesn’t misrepresent him or herself.
Most of the women and men who choose otherwise won’t be discovered, ever. What they’ve said and done won’t show up in the paper. If their lies, for instance, are uncovered by someone, I bet it’s even more likely that that person will call them out for it privately, or in a sector so small that their being called out for it won’t rip the rug of their lives out from under them. But that isn’t the point.
I don’t suggest living like a reporter will dig up our dirt so we sound good if a reporter actually writes about us. I suggest it because when we are in-authentic, in-credible and dishonest, we do a deeper disservice to our families, our friends and ourselves than a single story in the paper could convey. And for the flippin’ love of Pete, it’s the right thing to do. In the long run, we live life the hard way when we decide to manipulate our worlds so we can do whatever we want while we appear to be doing something completely different. We damage our families and friends if we’re discovered, and we damage them if we’re not (because how true is your love if nobody knows the person from whom it is given?).
My clutter free failure.
So in December of 2010, I decided 2011 would be my clutter free year.
Solely for the sake of full disclosure, I finally have an update: it has been a clutter free failure. I’d planned to declutter on a daily basis, to keep my room as tidy as it was the day I took the photos in the original post. The reasons for the experiment? “To delay gratification. To prioritize. To manage my time. To be patient. Pulling it off means severing all ties to spending tons of time hanging up laundry that’s been clean for weeks. It means I won’t have to spend the first few hours of a study day cleaning so I can focus. It means I won’t trip over shoes when I wake up in the morning.”
And I — queen of quitting stuff for good causes and without trouble (like the time I didn’t eat sugar for a year, and all my years lived sans social media) — never thought I couldn’t pull it off.
But I can’t pull this off, and I had to get that off my chest. I have, however, learned a few things:
1. I’m a far quicker room cleaner than I used to be. If I let my stuff pile up — and Lordy, I do — I’ve discovered that I can declutter with an entirely new rapidity. I have no real explanation for this other than miracles and/or the fact that I’ve finally accepted that I have a schedule that doesn’t allow for wasting time.
2. I declutter far more often than in years past. I now declutter once a week (as opposed to only when absolutely necessary and with the exceptions of during midterms and finals week), which is probably more reasonable for me considering my schedule. (I spend eight hours a week driving, for instance — and that only includes to and from work and school!)
3. I have room to improve. I’m a far cry more organized and better at managing my time now than ever before. But there’s still room for improvement. I have some ideas a-brewin’. Stay tuned.
A Murderer and a Mother
For awhile, an 11-year-old girl named Maria repeatedly rejected the sexual advances of a man who worked on her family’s farm. The man repeatedly refused to respect her rejection. And there came a day — July 5, a hundred and nine years ago — on which the man wouldn’t take no for answer. He tried to rape Maria.
Maria shouted for him to stop, and not so she’d be protected from him, but so he’d be protected from the sin he’d commit in rape. Angry at her response, he stabbed her fourteen times. On July 6, her wounds would prove fatal but before she died, she spent a day praying for the man, saying she forgives him and hoping she’d someday see him in heaven. Then, she died.
The man spent about thirty years in prison. While there, Maria appeared to him to tell him she forgives him. When he was released from prison, he visited Maria’s mother’s house. When she answered the door, he asked for her forgiveness. She said she’d already forgiven him.
This is where healing starts.
Several years later, in 1950, the man and Maria’s mother went to Rome to attend a ceremony together the day Pope Pius XXI canonized her. Ever since, she has been St. Maria Goretti. Today (July 6) is her feast day.