How do we award, reward, reinforce and otherwise encourage our behaviour?

There is beauty and there is the beautiful.

A scar across one’s face may lend one an air of distinction but we see in the mirror only an ugly scrape across our once unblemished visage.

Perception vs. reality.

At mid-life, I see my skin and its many changes due to sun/UV damage, knife cuts, wrinkles, blood donation needle entry points, and cat scratches.

None of these external marks on my body have affected my ability to drive a motorcar.

With age, however, my reaction times have slowed.

Therefore, my driving capabilities are diminished from the time, a year or so after getting my driver’s licence over 30 years ago, when I was best able to speed dangerously fast on backcountry, twisty roads, racing other kids in their late teens and early twenties.

There is, in other words, a time and place where our health, both mental and physical, is and isn’t detrimental to our sharing highways with other drivers of multitonne killing machines.

Yesterday, while dining with my wife at Nick’s Restaurant, a young man of 18 years crashed through vehicles at a traffic light and then proceeded 1.5 miles to the next intersection where he crashed into several more vehicles, killing a ten-year old child in one of them.

According to comments by readers on a local news company’s website, the driver is “Very sweet kid, good student and athlete!” and “an amazing kid and a close friend of mine he is diabetic”.

Yet, here we are looking at a dead child and many injured people because of one driver.

Should people with known medical conditions, which could endanger others — epilepsy, diabetes, old age related reaction times, etc. — be kept from driving, much the way aeroplane pilots lose their licences due to findings in medical examinations?

What is the threshold we’re willing to set that puts the best qualified people behind the wheel of a vehicle?

We already set age cutoffs.

Another reader commented, “How do you pass out from low blood sugar and keep driving? I know the family of the little girl who died. I am absolutely heartbroken for them. Praying for all involved.”

We could look at statistics which point out the benefits of a road system that sets a relatively low qualification threshold for driving a vehicle has increased our economic output higher than the detrimental effect of death/injury by many magnitudes much like we can say that the economic costs (gains?) of our “war on terror” is magnitudinally higher than the economic loss of dead/maimed military.

A ten-year old girl didn’t wake up to see the sunrise this morning or eat breakfast with her family.

Why?

Because an 18-year old boy drove when he shouldn’t’ve.

Perhaps cars and trucks of the future, before they’re all autonomously-controlled, will use technology that could have prevented yesterday’s tragedy.

Perhaps…

Let’s hope so.

The life of your ten-year young child may depend on it.