November 6th, 2003
Last night, coming home from my parents' place, I came around a corner on Highway 1 and saw, on the other side of the highway, a car doing cartwheels, sending metal and glass flying everywhere! It wasn't "just" rolling, it was smashing nose, then tail, then nose again! A terrible terrible accident, and I caught the end of it, though I don't know how it started. So I immediately pulled over and phoned 911, reported the accident. There were many people standing around the destroyed car by the time I left, but whoever was in the car did not look like they were conscious.
Can't find any mention of it in the news today though, so I'm guessing nobody was killed (you know how news outlets are; they'll report gruesome deaths to attract the advertising-susceptible blood-suckers out there, but an utterly destroyed car is oh-so-very ho-hum). The car was one of those souped-up, low-hung, rice-rocket Honda thingies ... which actually gives me a pretty good guess at how it happened (racing, or at least excessive speed).
I'd rant about young men and their motor-vehicular stupidity, but it's a pointless waste of time. I was once a young man performing vehicular stupidity, and back then I knew full well how stupid I was being; I didn't care. Not caring was part of what made it funny and liberating. Somehow I survived without killing someone else. Somehow I made it without ending up in a car doing cartwheels on Highway 1. It's not to my credit, it's just that I was lucky.
You see, reacting to the problem (speeding, racing) is not going to solve anything. You can make the punishments more and more harsh, and never address the underlying issue: That speeding is a social response to the contrast between a persona placed on young male drivers by popular and peer culture vs. social pressures by parents and other authority. Generalise that a bit, and you have an explanation (though no solution) to much of young men's behaviour.
The weaker the young man's convictions and personality, the less he resists others' impositions on him, and the harder his foot goes down on the gas pedal.