Texting while driving is one of the most selfish things a person can do. While attempting to text behind the wheel, a person’s attention is not on what is important, the road. Not only is my life on the line, but everyone else who is driving on the road has their life on the line too. This utter disrespect for human life is unsettling. If you choose to text and drive, why not just drive with a blindfold on or while doing a crossword? You might as well try to multitask even more because you’re already not paying any attention to the road!

While I am now an advocate for not using my phone while driving, I have not always been. When I first got my license, I would text and drive. I never understood the absolute dangers of being preoccupied while driving. I thought I was invincible, and I thought my actions only affected myself. I believed that nothing bad would ever happen to me. I thought checking a text was more important than paying attention to the road. A single, insignificant text was more important to me than my life. For a lack of a better term, I was selfish.

It was not until I witnessed a car crash the summer of my sophomore year that I realized texting and driving is very dangerous. I was driving home from work, and I stopped at a two-way stop waiting for cars to pass so I could go. I then saw a teenage girl’s car slowly creep out into the intersection. I was scared and confused as to why she was going because there were cars coming from both directions. I looked at the girl and saw her looking at her phone and I started to honk to get her attention, but I was too late. She was hit by another car that had a family of four inside. While there were no serious injuries, I saw the possibility of death for not only the girl, but the other driver, his wife, and their two little children.

For those of you who still do not see the dangers of texting and driving, I beg you to think of all the lives on the line. Is sending a single text worth the possible pain and grief of knowing that you have taken the life of someone else?