I moved into my new apartment this weekend, and since I don’t have my Internet or cable hooked up yet, I was sort of forced to watch one of the movies I have downloaded on iTunes. My movie of choice? Hot Fuzz, a satirical cop drama, starring the guy from Shawn of the Dead and Run Fat Boy Run. He also played Scotty in the recent Star Trek movie. I can’t think of his name right now, but the name of his hysterical, law enforcement-obsessed character is Sergeant Nicholas Angel.
In the movie, there is a “traffic collision” that Sergeant Angel’s partner, Officer Butterman, refers to as an “accident.” Sergeant Angel quickly corrects him and says, “Official vocab guidelines state that we now call these occurrences ‘collisions.’”
Officer Butterman asks, “Why is that?”
To which, Sergeant Angel replies: “Because ‘accident’ implies there is no one to blame.”
This comes to mind for me today because I came across the most frightening video on YouTube this weekend.
The driver in the video below is a 19-year-old in Beavercreek, Ohio.He decided it would be a good idea to travel at speeds over 100 mph down I-765. ABC Action News reports that he then lost control of his car, struck a culvert and then went airborne careening into a concrete bridge support. The force of the crash broke his Firebird into three pieces. The video you see below is courtesy of a law enforcement officer’s dashboard camera.
Amazingly, he survived, but is in critical condition.
HIS CAR BROKE INTO THREE PIECES?! And he is STILL BREATHING!
Does he know how LUCKY he is? Do the drivers around him know how lucky they are? What if there had been heavy traffic that day and one of the pieces of car hit another driver?!
It’s not an accident when you do something intentionally. He could have avoided this by keeping to the speed limit.
It is important to remember that you hold not only your own life, but the lives of others in your hands when you get behind the wheel. If he had killed another person because of his recklessness, and he survived, he would have to live with that for the rest of his life, and so would his family and the other families involved.
Arriving somewhere 20 minutes faster because you drove more than 100 mph isn’t worth your life or the lives of others. You’re hauling precious cargo. Remember that next time you put your foot on the gas pedal.
