Distracted Driving, It's Normal

       The other day, I was driving on the freeway, I had my cellphone propped up on my phone holder 

which was safely secured to the windshield by a suction-cup. I was headed in a direction that didn't 

require any help from my phone's GPS or for Siri to look up the nearest gas station or best coffee 

shop along the way. I came to a hard stop in traffic and had a second to glance around me at the other 

drivers, and I noticed something normal. Yes, normal, I say this because it is something we don't find 

peculiar in our society and generation anymore. Even though we were stopped on the freeway, 

everyone of us should have been paying attention to our surroundings and the movement up ahead, 

but instead everyone I could see was looking down at their phone. In that moment I thought anything 

could happen, the traffic could start moving, their could be an ambulance needing to get through, 

anything. 

       With the advancements in technology, there is no need for a hard copy of a map shoved into our 

glove-boxes any longer, nor a need to fixate our attention to driving. Essentially, we can have our 

phones do that for us, right? There are even cars that have video enabled parking features that assist 

the driver in backing up. Why is this "normal" and what happened to the old-fashioned "driving?" 

There once was a day where driving without distractions was actually important and allowed for us 

to see the traffic up ahead, but now it's ok to wave sorry to the pedestrian that you almost ran 

over? Sure, texting and driving is a sort of epidemic that has been made aware worldwide, even 

allowing law enforcement to pull you over for. Yet, even with the continuous streaming of ads and 

videos based on victims that have survived "texting accidents", there are more and more accidents 

everyday specific to cell phone usage and technology enthrallment.

       Accident Statistics shows us how we are inevitably moving closer to the extinction of safe roads. 

The approximated rate of accidents related to cellphones being using while driving is said to be a 

gross amount of 1.6 million, as the statistics states. Alarmingly, this isn't being shown in the news, 

when people complain about the pointless stories that show up in the news because of the lack of 

stories available, why aren't we hearing more about the severity of the issue at hand? The ads that 

show up on tv include alcoholism today, but it turns out that drinking isn't the number one cause of 

accidents anymore. Distracted driving is something that happens, it's normal, but should it be?