Life is precious

It has been a while since I wrote something here.

I have not been busy or anything, just taking things easy and taking care of my health.

As an asthma sufferer, the haze situation has restricted my movements these past few days, staying indoors as much as possible.

Even within the safety of the house, there were times these past week when I was wheezing pretty bad and had to resort to medication to breathe properly.

But that isn't the reason why I started writing again.

Someone asked me what I think about the dismal state of our road safety with an "Annie seems to go all statistics" among her sentence that I was like "Whoa, Annie and statistics don't seem to go together" so I went and checked her blog out.

Well, apparently she did write numbers and percentages unrelated to politics.

Not the latest, but several postings before that, which I skipped through all the in-betweens because I have an allergic reaction to politics nowadays, not quite an asthma attack but more of the nauseous kind, so there ...

And that was sad.

For one thing, the loss of human life has become just numbers to measure our "achievements" in comparison to others.

For another, it's kinda horrible to consider "the number of deaths declined by 3.9% from 4,940 victims compared to 5,138 victims last year" like yes, less people died, but thousands still died on the road while traveling from point A to point B.

I didn't get my driving licence in Malaysia, so I don't really know what kind of education would-be road users get prior to getting licensed to drive.

However, from my observation of how some road users behave on the road, I do believe they need to be thoroughly educated about proper usage of the road before they are even allowed out on it.

While some road users need to realise that these roads are not their own personal driveway or racing tracks, so please ...

Those private driving schools are okay I suppose, but I would like to suggest the transport department include at least a few hours of road safety awareness classes conducted by government officers/teachers/lecturers/law enforcement officers, with attendees being thoroughly tested for their comprehension to ensure that they understand the importance of using the road safely before they even get their licence.

And of course there are those who need serious psychological evaluations, driving tests are simply insufficient ...

Road safety campaigns and other such measures are simply ineffective after the fact because we have failed to weed out the most likely road killers and suicidal maniacs from getting licensed to create mayhem on our roads.

As for the adrenaline junkies out there, who are mostly youngsters and young at heart otais, they need to be gotten off the road into proper tracks where they can waste their life away getting all juiced up about whatever it is that get them all excited without endangering innocent road users.

I would like to suggest the government use some of those youth-related budget to set up and maintain a number of affordable public tracks where these speedsters can get themselves killed if they so wish (at least it won't get into our road deaths statistics).

Get one of these groups to kinda manage the place themselves ... if they can organise road races, they can surely organise track races.

Build a number of these tracks so that they can have inter-group events and such, allow them to have a place of their own where they can socialise and do their thing.

Do monitor them and take action when negative and unlawful elements start to creep in, but it is far easier for law enforcement officers to take action in a controllable environment than on the streets.

And for god's sake, don't let Umno Youth, or anyone with political affiliations, get anywhere near those tracks nor that budget ... they are just killjoys and will most likely fail.

For those who were caught flaunting the laws, instead of simply fining them, make them pay the fine as payment for 30 hours of mandatory road safety lessons and make sure they are banned from driving until they completed those mandatory hours.

If they were caught 9 times for various offences, then that means 270 hours of mandatory road safety lessons because they are too dense to understand that life is precious for others if not for themselves.

Even if they have to spend their entire lives attending road safety lessons.