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Think about this. You might be killed by a distracted driver.

The chances of that happening are increasing dramatically. More freeways, more traffic, more cell phones, more distractions and more accidents.

It's gotten to the point where we might want to consider starting another organization: MADCD, Mothers Against Distracted Cellphone Drivers.

Have you witnessed a freeway calamity lately? It's not a pretty sight.

A year ago I was driving in the fast lane of a sparsely occupied Los Angeles freeway on a sunny Saturday morning when a white car passed me like a meteor from space. It rammed into the back end of a green sedan driven by a elderly male minding his own business and sent it into a eye popping spin.

Some sort of phenomenal act of physics, understood only by Al Einstein and his buddies, kept that thing from rolling over countless times like a drunk who'd just tripped over a curb, saving the old man from a fate worse than death.

Meanwhile the white meteor soared on with nary a pause as though it were driven by someone at a local carnival enjoying another ride in a bumper car. I lost sight of it despite my best efforts, being more concerned with the fate of the old man who I thought might still possibly succumb to a heart attack, stroke or the advanced stages of shock.

The absurdity of the event was magnified by the emptiness of the freeway. You could have easily maneuvered three buses, two tractor trailers and a crane around either side of the green sedan and still had room for a VW bug.

Nevertheless the white meteor zeroed in on it's rear end as though it were equipped with a missile's homing device and plowed through it like a bunker bashing bomb going through twenty feet of concrete, leading me to conclude that it's driver was focused on everything other than piloting an automobile.

Miles later I noticed the same white meteor slipping onto the freeway again from an on ramp at a much more conservative speed and sped ahead of it to see the dents and green streaks that would confirm its guilt.

The young driver, a girl with fear in her eyes, knew that I knew and I memorized her license plate number with the smell of burnt rubber still fresh in my mind and called the Highway Patrol (later) but they never answered and I finally gave up.

Now I can't be sure if she was distracted by an incoming call or suffering from total blindness but I think we can safely rule out the latter.

And before we take a "holier than thou" view I must admit to close calls resulting from my own cell phone dialing and text messaging and I'm sure that you can to if you're human. Only dumb luck has kept me from having to live with the same guilt that this young girl is no doubt living with, especially since she couldn't know the final outcome of the mistake.

So maybe we need to do something about something that could destroy my life and your life and your children's lives and too many other people's lives.

Because no call is so important that it's worth any of our lives.

Learn more about this author, Kevin Holten.
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