FREEDOM : Dangerous Driving, the issue of importance to me

Freedom.
Ask any teenager what two words describe freedom the best. I'm sure the answer is driver's license. The small, plastic card is our ticket to a vibrant social life and a convenience for self-reliant transportation. The ultimate teenage dream, until texting, inexperience and other distractions transform it into a dystopia.

Motor vehicle accidents are the leading cause of teenage deaths in the United States; a statistic that has affected the lives of many people in my community.

Two years ago on a rainy day, a sophomore, Nicole LeGrow from my partner high school died in a tragic car crash on a local highway. Her friend, the driver, survived the crash and lives with minor injuries and the burden of Nicole's death. The next year, three boys drove into a tree, due to their choice to drive after drinking at a party and resided in Intensive Care Unit for three months. All three were friends of my older brother. Accidents like these distress citizens and are detrimental to the community. My deep concerns about these catastrophic events were too vital to ignore, so I acted on my instincts and decided to make our school aware of the accidents. As a junior, I wrote for the school newspaper and I used this media outlet to cover the Awareness Run held for Nicole LeGrow. My story made the front page and I witnessed my classmates become cognizant of the responsibility that comes with driving and the dangers of driving distractions, because of my article. Several students thanked me for my work because they were close to Nicole and thought her death was something other teens in our school needed to take seriously and learn from her unfortunate fate.

The loss of life requires someone to take responsibility and the only one who usually takes responsibility in a teen driving accident, is the teenager driving. Yet, in some cases the passengers deserves to take the blame just as much as the driver.

Why should someone sit in the passenger seat and let a relatively new, teen driver attempt to text and watch the road respectively? Therefore, when I am the passenger in a friend's car, I take on the duty to text and call for them while they concentrate on driving. It's a small action that can make a significant difference in many lives.

The last task I gave myself to practice safe teen driving was to learn how to drive from a professional. I paid for my driving school, instead of doing parent taught and partially learning the laws of the road. I took a bus every day during the winter break of my junior year to attend a two hour class, in addition to seven, two hour driving lessons from my instructor. I made these sacrifices to keep myself, my passengers and the people on the road safe when I am behind the wheel.

The freedom given to teenagers, which is packaged with a driver's license, is a privilege that needs to be taken gravely. Being able to drive as a teen shouldn't be worth lives.

:D .... Quite interesting : )


As a junior, I dedicated my article "Awareness Run held for Nicole" on the school newspaper in my efforts to build awareness on dreadful consequences of dangerous driving.

I suggest you to add more emotions and feelings when you talk about your friend's tragic death. Since the prompt is aimed at an issue that has a major significance to you, you can take that incident as the point that changed your perception about care-free driving and made you responsible for educating others too on that.