We don’t know if the young people careening around Harrison Hot Springs Saturday night were graduates, out celebrating and blowing off some year-end steam.
We don’t know their names, as of deadline. We only know they were young, from out of town, quite definitely drinking, and that the driver was reported to be driving erratically. The result, quite tragicallly, was yet another death due to drinking and driving.
It’s a conclusion that’s always only a matter of time for those who chose to drink and drive.
It’s only a matter of time before the road disappears from in front of you, you lose control of the wheel, you’re distracted, or you pass out.
Sure, you might have made it home after one or two drinks a couple of times. You may have even navigated your way home a few times after downing five or six drinks. Maybe you drive regularly after smoking pot, and have always made it home. Maybe you take a ‘road pop’ with you, thinking you’ll never get caught, and never cause an accident.
If that sounds like you — even if you’re ashamed to admit it — you’ve been lucky. But the thing about luck is that it always runs out, eventually.
Two people are killed as a result of drunk driving each week in this province. And those are only the cases where a conviction was possible. Across Canada, that number jumps to four a day. Four deaths every day, due to a combination of poor planning, machismo and/or ignorance.
It’s a sad statistic. It’s even more sad when the person who dies is not the drunk driver, but a passenger, pedestrian or someone in another vehicle, in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But it is a changeable statistic. It just takes a willingness for each of us to be the change, one day at a time.
Agassiz-Harrison Observer
