one day without breaking one law

something i've been thinking about recently is texting and driving. i do it. i do a lot of things while driving actually. in high school, i was notorious for doing my makeup, while listening to my favorite morning radio show, THE BERT SHOW and eating breakfast. in my personal opinion, the best way to pass the time in the car is by chatting on the phone whether its a quick trip to Kroger, a lengthy adventure involving traffic or a roadtrip across state lines. i was coming back from my beloved Tuscaloosa last week and texting not one person, but two or three as i was comfortably seated with cruise control. i didnt have a near death experience or anything, but all of the sudden, this huge tractor trailer was honking at me in the lane to the right and shooting me the nastiest looks he could make while going 70 miles per hour. i assumed it was because i was texting and driving. so this got me thinking, "you know, this is pretty dangerous." i can't say that i am going to miraculously stop texting and driving tomorrow, because i can't keep that promise. but it is against the law. and it is unsafe. i'm not ready to take Oprah's No Phone Zone Pledge, but its a goal I am going to work toward. Let's try to stop texting and driving, fellow readers. I know its not going to be easy to break a habit, but at least we can encourage each other against something that puts our lives at risk and risks the safety of the thousands of cars we pass. What do you say? Not to a pledge or a "wake up tomorrow and change" but to a, "i agree. and i'm going to start trying not to text and drive." This post was inspired by an article in this mornings AJC. I HIGHLY recommend reading it here. To brush up on Georgia's laws, click here.

I most likely break some law at least multiple times a day. There are a lot of things that I do with the impression that I am invincible. I hardly believe that sending one little text message will result in me spending years in jail from vehicular manslaughter, but in reality, it certainly could. With a little inspiration from a dear friend to review my annual resolutions, I find it difficult to assess progress on old resolutions when all I want to do is add new ones. I want to stop texting and driving. I need to stop drinking and driving. What other everyday things do you do that is unsafe, unhealthy, illegal? Unprotected sex. The tanning bed. Smoking cigarettes. Doing drugs. We may be young, but the things we do have consequences in many forms. Behavior doesn't change over night, but that doesn't mean that it's not worth trying to change. 
 
Read the article and say what you think about texting and driving and the laws that make it illegal yet still so easily done. Excerpt from the AJC article mentioned above: Texting may have led to a double-fatal crash in Newnan in late May, Cosper said. A 16-year-old driver ran a red light and hit another car just before midnight, killing both drivers. Friends of the teen victim have said they believe the driver was distracted by a text.  “Some people refer to it as being “intexticated,” Cosper said.

Does the meager tally of citations make the law, which carries penalties of a $150 fine and one point on the offender's license, a failure?  Not to hear the people responsible for enacting and promoting it.

"You have to remember that the intent was to change behavior," said state Rep. Allen Peake, R-Macon, who promoted the bill authored by state Sen. Jack Murphy, R-Cumming.

Peake said he knows first-hand that an understanding of how dangerous the practice is won't necessarily stop someone. "I was the world's worst," he said.

Now, based on what he hears from friends and family members, "I seriously believe we have changed the behavior."

Monica Maurer, who sees people driving erratically almost daily as she commutes to Georgia State University, disagrees. At least half the people she rides with still routinely text and drive, she said.

"If it is helping, it's not helping much," the 23-year-old student said of the ban -- which, incidentally, she thought applied only to people younger than 18.

Often, her friends won't desist even when she asks them. "They say, ‘I'm fine, I know what I'm doing,'" she said. "It freaks me out."

So who's right?

It's impossible to know, many experts said.

Twelve months isn't enough time to measure changes in behaviors such as texting while driving -- if it's possible to measure them at all.