The other day I almost committed vehicular manslaughter.  It was anything but my fault, and I’m still fuming about it.

I was driving back from the post office, approaching a light.  The light was green, and I was in the right lane, slowing and signaling for a right turn into the rightmost lane of a four-lane street.  Just as I got around the corner, a skateboarder whizzed off a sidewalk and straight down the middle of my lane going the wrong way and directly at me. I barely managed to get into the inner lane, fortunately empty at the time, to avoid hitting him. The skateboarder was no child, but a long-bearded young man, wearing earbuds and a bemused expression, easily traveling at fifteen miles an hour plus. Had I struck the distracted skateboarder, the results would have been exceedingly painful, if not fatal, for him, and possibly financially, morally, emotionally, and legally wrenching for me. 

The young man who almost hit me head-on was traveling quickly, going the wrong way, wearing earbuds and presumably distracted, and not wearing a helmet. That combination made him a perfect candidate for the Darwin Awards[ a satiric award recognizing individuals who have contributed to human evolution by self-selecting themselves out of the human gene pool by their own unnecessarily foolish actions], as did his apparent lack of awareness of just how dangerous what he was doing happened to be.

Looking at the statistics, this was anything but a freak occurrence. While in recent years, automobile fatalities have been decreasing, and overall pedestrian fatalities have decreased, injuries and fatalities have steadily increased among distracted walkers… and among skateboarders on streets and roads, rather than at skateboard parks. The number of pedestrians injured and killed while on cell phones has prompted several cities to propose penalties and citations for distracted walking, and many schools, universities, and other institutions have imposed restrictions on skateboards because of repeated occurrences of behavior dangerous to both skateboarders and others.

Part of this is because the electronics are clearly so addictive that their users lose touch with the everyday and seemingly mundane world around them, and part of the problem is that far too many young people have been given the message that they are the center of the world.  As a result, they don’t fully appreciate that if they walk or skateboard into the path of a 2,000-5,000 pound vehicle, they run a high probability of being immediately and painfully removed from both the real world and their personal illusory world… not to mention the fact that everyone else will also pay a high price.

But then… that lack of understanding may be why they’re candidates for the Darwin Award.