What I wish I learned in college—car accident fatality edition

A lot of people bag on their college education—-they’ve forgotten everything they learned, being able to analyze To the Lighthouse never helped them get a job, blah blah. Now I’m not going to that far. I actually think I’ve actually used my English degree in my chosen profession and even my day job—-and NO I’m not a teacher.

But there are a few aspects to real life that I felt woefully unprepared for upon graduation. For instance, there really, really, really should be a Health Insurance 101. And it should be a requirement. I also wish introductory classes to finance and economics had been a requirement, since there was no way I was going to take those classes of my own volition and take away time from my novel reading, and since I now feel completely lost in regards to economic issues and had to flounder around with my personal finances at square one.

But those aren’t the classes I want to discuss today. Today I would like to discuss the necessity of using education to prevent people from dying in car accidents. Or having them in the first place. And I’m not talking about some lame-ass DARE-type program (although I actually loved DARE, haha) where you see gory pictures of people in car crashes, although I’m sure that helps to an extent. No, I’m talking about evasive driving courses.

Oh sure, evasive driving courses exist, but they cost a shitload of money and no one takes them. And oh sure, you have to take driver’s ed, but that just teaches you how to drive, not how to evade a car coming right at you. At the same time, do you know what your likelihood of dying in an accident is? If you’re in your twenties, it’s the most likely way for you to die, higher than every single disease or other type of accident. Almost every time I get into my car, I feel like I’m stepping into a death trap. I should probably take public transportation more often.

Anyone ever heard of Jacqui Saburido? She’s one of those stories to scare you into never drinking and driving, since she was in a car hit head-on by a drunk driver. And maybe there’s nothing that could have prevented that, even with the most skillful driver at the wheel. But who knows: maybe if the driver had taken an evasive driving course, they would have known what to do and would have avoided the accident, or at least it may not have been as bad as it was (the driver and front seat passenger were killed instantly).

For that matter, I don’t see why colleges (or better, high schools) also don’t mandate courses in Krav Maga. That’s a mixed martial art form developed by the Israeli army that’s the only martial art I know of that actually takes guns into account, making it actually applicable to the modern world. It’s designed for last-resort situations where someone’s going to kill you whether you act or not. Doesn’t that seem like something you might want to know??

You know why they don’t already teach these courses? Other than lack of desire, it’s also, of course, lack of funds. Ritzy private schools, however, have no excuse.

No one wants to think about this stuff. Whenever we have to go to our office’s safety orientation, we kind of chuckle and roll our eyes. But in the middle of a fire, it’s not going to seem so funny. I sure would have like to have taken a “what to do if the ship sinks” course before getting on the Titanic. In light of disasters like that, such training doesn’t seem so quaint.

But it would also be a pain to take all those courses, wouldn’t it? All that time we’d be spending on evasive driving and Krav Maga is time away from what we really want spend our time (and money) on (like plasma screens and WoW). Fatal accidents and attacks happen just rarely enough that they don’t seem worth preparing for—-the same reason a lot of people in Los Angeles don’t bolt down their furniture in case of an earthquake. But we do have enough foresight to have health insurance, car insurance, life insurance, disability insurance—-although a lot of that is—-surprise!--mandated by the state, or else we’d never do it. So why not require training to minimize the risk of ever making a claim on our disability or life insurance in the first place? Who even knows how to do CPR?? (I don’t.)

That said, am I now gonna run out and take such courses? Hell no, I don’t have the time for that. But it sure would have been nice to have done it in college. If I had to.