Texting, Driving, and the Innocents

If you pay less than $4.3 million for your phone plan, you’re more fortunate than a Florida man whose texting-and-driving lost him a lawsuit this month.

His then-girlfriend was a passenger in 2010 when his texting led him to run a stop sign and crash into a truck, according to the Daytona Beach News-Journal and the A.P.  The girlfriend sued, and a judge ruled in her favor this month to the tune of seven figures.  Her lawyers say she still uses a wheelchair and has brain damage.  The fact that it could happen to any of us should be argument enough to put our phones away when we get behind the wheel.

Plus, that’s a lot of money.  On Interstate 90, a line of 4.3 million one-dollar bills would stretch from Seattle to about 100 miles past Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, which at 60 miles per hour would take over 6 ½ hours to drive from end to end.  4.3 million seconds from now, it will be October.

There was another major factor in the case, too: neither the driver nor the passenger were wearing seat belts.  But the weight of the case seems to have centered around the driver’s decision to text.

He and his passenger are lucky to be alive, and not just because of the seat belts.  According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, an average of about nine people died every day in 2012 from distraction-related accidents, and an estimated 1,150 people each day (average) were injured.  In Boise, a mother who was partially paralyzed in 2010 after texting “I love you” from behind the wheel is now part of a campaign to persuade drivers to stop typing in motion.

For my own part, I do text.  The earliest message I clearly remember sending was the code “ISP” in early 2007—back before the medium had emerged as the go-to it is today—to signal my father that my plane had landed at Islip, N.Y.  That was then, when texting was still a novelty.  By late 2012, Americans were sending 6 billion text messages every day in the U.S. alone, according to CTIA, a Washington, D.C.,-based lobbying and wireless trade group.  That’s over 69,000 every second.  Why shouldn’t a medium this simple, this ubiquitous, this useful, tempt us when we’re behind the wheel?

State governments have noticed the temptation.  Washington State, for example, can charge $124 for an infraction, and Oregon can fine up to $500.  In Alaska, drivers can be fined up to $10,000 for texting while driving, and up to $50,000 if someone is injured.  Good.  We need more deterrence, not less.

It’s encouraging to see the rumblings of regulatory and grassroots work to help to curb the problem.  A video by WJBF in Augusta, Ga., shows two drivers, one of whom has crossed the center line while texting.  Time freezes a split second before the collision is to take place, and the non-texting driver pleads for the lives of her two children in the backseat.  It’s “supposed to be a quick text,” the other driver replies.  “I’m so sorry.”  The cars ram into each other head-on.  End of commercial.  The ad went viral.

I've been convicted by the video, and by the practice, as I’ve puttered around the Sound in my Corolla over the last week or two.  I’ve caught myself doing all manner of absent-minded things behind the wheel, like talking to a friend and almost having an accident, or impulsively checking the caller ID in peak-hour traffic, or checking my call-log.  Apparently the idea of how much damage a car can do at 60 miles per hour hasn’t quite gotten through my head.

Nor through our culture’s, judging by the number of times we do this every year.  A $4.3 million ruling should be a wake-up call for us, as should the fact of how many livelihoods we’re willing to risk by typing on the road—the children, mothers, doctors, humanitarians, big brothers and sisters, friends, lovers, fiancées, janitors, mentors, and all the rest, all made in the image of God.

Texting itself can be a powerful tool for good.  It can ease communication and help cement a society together, and that's often the way it works.  But texting behind the wheel isn't just a bad idea.  It's a reckless, senseless endangerment of people for whom Jesus died and rose again, and it needs to stop.

     Special thanks to Nick Harrell for help with research, and to Kiona Hampton for posting the WJBF video, which inspired this post.

No Water? No Problem

EPHRATA, Wash., August 17

Water is scarce in this part of the world if you don’t know where to find it and how to use it.  Maybe God did that on purpose.

Today’s Old Testament lesson from Genesis 45 is the story of how God used an exchange of grace in an otherwise dysfunctional family—the family of Jacob, “Israel” himself—to deliver an entire population from the effects of a drought so bad, it spanned seven years and bled from Egypt into Canaan.  Like drought-ridden Egypt in those days, this barren-yet-fertile part of Washington is a lesson in stewardship, planning, and knowing your limits.

Ephrata was known to early white settlers as “Indian Graves”.  Why “graves”?  Perhaps for how desolate the landscape would have looked in those days before high-tech irrigation.  Now, Ephrata is the seat of what's reputed to be the most potato-producing county in the U.S., a county blanketed with fertile agricultural land in spite of the dry conditions.

Grand Coulee Dam.

Photo copyright © Charles Harrell 2014.  Used by permission.

How is that possible?  Three words: Grand Coulee Dam, the famous and imposing structure on the Columbia River 60 miles north of here.  As one of a series of dams in the region, Grand Coulee can irrigate about 670,000 acres by itself, or a farm slightly larger than the state of Rhode Island.  Thanks to the work of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (a significant presence here in Ephrata), the water level is regulated throughout the year to provide enough water for farms, along with a lot of the hydro-electricity that keeps our espresso machines whistling in the Northwest.

Ephrata, being populated by farm-folk and federal workers, bears a slight resemblance to my old hometown of Lusby, Maryland, which is in tobacco country but also has its local share of Navy and government folks.  But unlike southern Maryland, which has three major bodies of water (the Patuxent and Potomac Rivers and the Chesapeake Bay) to Ephrata’s one (the Columbia), Ephrata can’t just count on rain or haul a bucket in from the river anytime it wants to.  The Columbia is in a gorge.  Much of Grant County, Washington, is on a plateau.

When I first moved to central Washington two years ago, I was astounded at how fast a person can get dehydrated.  In the mid-Atlantic, your sweat is a giveaway because the humidity prevents it from leaving your skin.  After you take a shower in the summer, you might as well take another shower.

Here, Mother Nature will phaser-vaporize the water right out of you before you know it, and you can get dehydrated without noticing your own perspiration.  But thanks to the Reclamation people, and their careful stewardship of water at the dam, a place whose aridity once made it an agricultural wasteland is now alive with the miles and miles of farms and the zing of hydroelectric power, a living, fertile landscape.

Life with Jesus has its dry seasons.  The Hebrews had their songs of “ascents” for the long, arduous climb up the hills into Jerusalem a few times a year, some of which survive today in the back pages of the book of Psalms.  And Jesus himself warned us about what can happen to the “seed” of the word of God when it’s not properly planted: “the sun rose, they were scorched; and since they had no root, they withered away” (Matt. 13:6; see Luke 8:11).  Were it not for deliberate irrigation, this town, which a sandwich-shop local tells me is full of hidden gems and is a nice place to grow up in, would probably cease to exist for the 7,900 people who live here.

But it all starts with regulating the water on the Columbia—the dam retains 400 billion cubic feet of it, enough to cover most of New England in a three-inch puddle—so that when the dry seasons come, there will be water to spare and the potatoes can keep growing.

The same is true in life with Christ.  Who are the people “pouring” God’s love into you, the relationships with family and friends that you’re cultivating, such that when the dry season comes, you’ll be able to survive?  What are the skills of spiritual discipline that today you can “stock up on”—make part of your daily routine with the Lord—so that you’ll have experience and Scripture-knowledge to draw on when the going gets tough?  What will be your song of ascents?

In my life, the Lord has sometimes given me “streams in the desert” (Isa. 35:6), helping me through the hard times of spiritual drought that are simply a part of life.  But the providence has usually come through God’s having prepared me beforehand, in the times that I felt the most at rest.  Ephrata wouldn’t be the bread basket it is today without careful planning and the water-stewardship that has taken place over the last century.  Jesus offers us living water in his very self.  Let’s soak up as much as we can.

All Scripture is nrsv unless noted.  This post was edited from Puyallup on August 17.