An American Lion

It’s a natural emotion—complaining. Wait a minute. Is complaining an emotion? It should be. Therefore, it is.

Anyway, when I drive, I don’t do anything distracting. I have a hands-free communication system, which means I can talk on the phone using voice commands. I cannot blog in the car behind the wheel yet, but that’s just around the corner. One day, I expect to be able to drive around town, blogging by using voice commands. I expect to be able to say, “blog post. An American Lion. Create a new post. Wait, go get me a news story. Not that one. Not that one. Not that one. Not that one. Okay, use that one. Already, we see the end of the Obama Administration is nigh. Spell check. Ignore the fact that Obama always looks misspelled. Is misspelled misspelled? Spell check. Okay, blah, blah, blah, take five paragraphs, have Peej come up with something clever, put the annoying tags in there, use the my brilliant mind category, publish, and what’s for lunch?”

I don’t text. Texting is how poor people complain about things. What a negative emotion. Here’s a story, blah, blah, blah:

In her fluorescent yellow jacket and white gloves, Mary Parker is a suburban icon: a school crossing guard. Rain or shine, she’s all smiles, and she calls everyone, from the tiniest kindergartner to the cool middle-school kids, “Hon.” Like crossing guards everywhere, her mere presence – plus the flick of a wrist – in the middle of an intersection in this Boston suburb can bring traffic to a screeching halt.

But that power is being challenged these days. Ms. Parker and her colleagues who work for the local police department are increasingly vying with cellphones for drivers’ attention, and they are no longer 100 percent sure their gestures guarantee protection for school kids.

Parker recounts a “very scary” close call last spring as she was signaling traffic to stop while a group of children was crossing the street. The driver, who was on her cellphone, rolled right through the stop sign, oblivious to Parker’s increasingly panicked signals from the middle of the intersection. Parker says the driver seemed to be looking directly at her but without eye contact.

“She said she didn’t see me,” Parker says with near-fresh astonishment, echoing an excuse many cellphone-using drivers give after accidents caused by what researchers call “inattention blindness.”

There’s no such thing as “inattention blindness.” The driver was not looking where she should have been looking, and so she was distracted. If you’re poor and have no influence, you text because you’re trying to gain influence. No one successful does anything they don’t have to do while driving, and most successful people don’t drive themselves anywhere. Desperate people who want to text all of their homeys to say that “No I dindt got that msg was i sposed to dam how cm evrby up in my bizness?????????” are going to waste their time texting no matter what.

Should texting while driving be banned? Absolutely. Good luck legislating away stupidity. If you have to have a law banning something that common sense tells you that you shouldn’t do, then no amount of passing crazy laws is going to help.

Technology being what it is, here’s how you stop texting while driving. By putting a simple motion detector in the phone, and by triangulating the signal in the phone, the device can detect whether it is being used in a moving vehicle. Simply disable the texting option, leaving the device capable of being used only for communicating through a hands-free device. If you’re riding shotgun, too bad. Your texting could still distract the driver, especially if you’re all up in the driver’s particular business.