DRIVING TO A FUNERAL
Driving to The Funeral
By Anna Quindlen
Writer Anna Quindlin was born in Philidelphia, Pensylvania, in 1952, and now lives in New York City. At the New York Times she became a regular op-ed columnist, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1992.
If someone told you that there was one behavior most likely to lead to the premature death of your kid, wouldn't you do something about that?
The four years of high school grind inexorably [inevitably] to a close, the milestones passed. The sports contests, the SATs, the exams, the elections, the dances, the proms. And too often, the funerals. It's become a sad rite of passage in many American communities, the services held for teenagers killed in auto accidents before they've even scored a tassel to hang from the rearview mirror. The hearse moves in procession followed by the late-model compact cars of young people, boys trying to control trembling lower lips and girls sobbing into one another's shoulders. The yearbook has a picture or two with a black border. A mom and dad rise from their seats on the athletic field or in the gym to accept a diploma posthumously [afterward].
It's simple and inarguable: car crashes are the No. 1 cause of death among 15- to 20-year-olds in this country. What's so peculiar about that fact is that so few adults focus on it until they are planning an untimely funeral. Put it this way: if someone told you that there was one single behavior that would be most likely to lead to the premature death of your kid, wouldn't you try to do something about that? Yet parents seem to treat the right of a 16-year-old to drive as an inalienable one, something to be neither questioned nor abridged [reduced].
This makes no sense unless the argument is convenience, and often it is. In a nation that developed mass-transit amnesia and traded the exurb [a town beyond suburbs where rich live]for the small town, a licensed son or daughter relieves parents of a relentless roundelay of driving.
By Anna Quindlen
Writer Anna Quindlin was born in Philidelphia, Pensylvania, in 1952, and now lives in New York City. At the New York Times she became a regular op-ed columnist, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1992.
If someone told you that there was one behavior most likely to lead to the premature death of your kid, wouldn't you do something about that?
The four years of high school grind inexorably [inevitably] to a close, the milestones passed. The sports contests, the SATs, the exams, the elections, the dances, the proms. And too often, the funerals. It's become a sad rite of passage in many American communities, the services held for teenagers killed in auto accidents before they've even scored a tassel to hang from the rearview mirror. The hearse moves in procession followed by the late-model compact cars of young people, boys trying to control trembling lower lips and girls sobbing into one another's shoulders. The yearbook has a picture or two with a black border. A mom and dad rise from their seats on the athletic field or in the gym to accept a diploma posthumously [afterward].
It's simple and inarguable: car crashes are the No. 1 cause of death among 15- to 20-year-olds in this country. What's so peculiar about that fact is that so few adults focus on it until they are planning an untimely funeral. Put it this way: if someone told you that there was one single behavior that would be most likely to lead to the premature death of your kid, wouldn't you try to do something about that? Yet parents seem to treat the right of a 16-year-old to drive as an inalienable one, something to be neither questioned nor abridged [reduced].
This makes no sense unless the argument is convenience, and often it is. In a nation that developed mass-transit amnesia and traded the exurb [a town beyond suburbs where rich live]for the small town, a licensed son or daughter relieves parents of a relentless roundelay of driving.