Have fun, and watch the road

It was the end of my second semester of college, and I hadn’t driven a car in months. I got sick of the P2P after the fall semester (very nearly literally), and my only time spent in cars was in short trips off campus, so I spent very little time in automobiles.

The end of the year arrived, and my dad came to drive me home. We got on the highway, starting the long, arduous trip to Raleigh, and I immediately felt the uncomfortable gastric squirm of motion sickness, greeting me like an old friend cheerfully wrapping his arm around my intestines. And not only was I-40 moderately nauseating a little before rush hour, but it was scary.

Granted, it may have had a little to do with riding shotgun in a 12-passenger van with suspension like a water bed, but something about breezing through dense traffic at high speeds was fairly unnerving, and the next day I discovered driving was even worse.

I quickly got over this anxiety in the following weeks, making myself drive every day and thus desensitizing myself to the mild terror of the highway. But that got me thinking.

My anxiety didn’t constitute a full-blown phobia, but desensitization, as a legitimate therapeutic procedure, is regularly used for overcoming real irrational fears. Often it just involves repeatedly exposing people to heights, ducks, zippers or whatever it is they’re afraid of, and then the original reaction to the stimuli is worn down until it’s barely even noticeable.

But is it irrational to be afraid of cars? Because there’s so much potential for things to go wrong, I think it’s perfectly rational to worry.

We’ve come a long way since the pre-seat belt era, but today’s highways aren’t all airbags, car seats and rainbows now. It’s definitely possible to worry too much, but most of us go about our daily lives without any concern at all for the danger we put ourselves in on the road.

It’s like we’ve already been thoroughly desensitized, and now the incredibly dangerous is almost mundane.

Isn’t it odd how routine it feels to climb into massive metal death boxes and go barreling down motorways at supernatural speeds, sometimes no more than a coffee spill or a violent sneeze away from smashing into other such vehicles?

For a species with such a supposedly strong instinct for self-preservation, it’s shocking how often we entrust our well-being to complete strangers on the road. Especially when we know they’re likely just as sleepy and unreliable as us — and no less prone to drinking, texting, eating or checking their complexion in the mirror while driving.

So let’s do our part and be conscious of the tremendous impact a car can have on a person’s skeletal structure.

In 2009 there were 10.8 million motor vehicle accidents reported in the United States, and almost 36,000 deaths as a result.

On that note, have a great spring break! But be careful around cars.