Driving drunk is never OK
Family left destroyed by a society bent on discounting the risks
“If I take this risk, it will be OK.”
Isn’t that what many of us, despite years of public education, still think as we sit behind the wheel about to do something that may, just may, be deadly?
Whether it’s texting while driving — usually such trivial messages! — or ignoring the fact that after working eight hours, we’ve not only had two full glasses of wine at book club, but we’re really really tired, we give ourselves permission to push it. We discount the risk. We focus on the desire: gotta get to where I’m going.
According to statistics from the organization MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) “every day, on average, four Canadians are killed and 175 are injured in impairment-related crashes.”
Cops do it — more than 60, from various police forces around Ontario, have been disciplined for drinking and driving since 2010, according to a recent report in the Star. Mothers do it. Teachers do it. Politicians do it. First responders and doctors do it. And, alas, allegedly a vastly privileged young man with previous provincial offences for drinking and also for speeding.
It’s never OK, although luck and circumstance can make it seem so. Hey, bottom line is “I made it home safe.”
Three little children from one Brampton family and their grandfather will never be home and safe again.
Marco Muzzo, 29, grandson of a billionaire and member of a construction clan whose proud business motto is “Do Good Work,” faces 18 charges in their deaths, including four counts of impaired driving causing death. The maximum penalty for this is life imprisonment.
It was a Sunday afternoon in Vaughan, around 4 p.m. — an innocent time of day, a time for naps, or family outings, backyard play or a restorative cup of tea — when little Daniel Neville-Lake, 9, and his siblings Harry, 5, and Millie, 2, were wiped out with their grandfather Gary Neville, 65, after an SUV crashed into the side of their minivan and then struck another car.
The children’s grandmother and great-grandmother suffered serious but non life-threatening injuries.
The story hit hard, shook us, grabbed at our hearts, fuelled our collective outrage. I will condense all of Twitter sentiment about the young man who is charged but not convicted into one line: “He better suffer #BIGTIME.”
Consider the shocking toll. A family destroyed. “All my babies are gone,” the children’s mother, Jennifer Neville-Lake, told the Star. She and her husband Edward were clearly too shocked to yet be angry.
Up to 35 first responders were reportedly so shaken after dealing with the victims they needed counselling. Then there are the disconsolate young school friends, extended family, hospital personnel, other parents, and further out, collaterally, all of us.
Like many others, I gasped and called out “no!” when I heard the news. Since then, I can barely read the tender Facebook statements or hear how Jennifer and Edward were with two of their little ones as they lay lifeless in hospital.
Nothing will ever make it right for this family again. They have begun a never-ending story of shock, grief, anger, loss, memory and missing. When your children are so young, your overarching identity is that of a parent. Nothing else is as pressing or important. Yet how do you continue to be parents without your children?
We don’t want to acknowledge this, but the Muzzo family is also now in its own hell. Despite some justifiable Twitter outrage over the gross insensitivity of Muzzo’s lawyer’s statement after leaving his client — “It’s a tough go for him right now, as I’m sure you can appreciate” — anyone with grown kids, all of whom are imperfect, can at least understand the emotional mess they face, the refracted guilt, the dreadful sense that they collectively bear some responsibility for this alleged crime.
We find it easier to be mad at a made-to-order alleged culprit — rich, young, seemingly oblivious of consequence — than at ourselves, and at a society that, no matter how far it’s come in making drinking and driving a social taboo, clearly hasn’t come far enough.
I grew up in a family in which there was much drinking and driving. Back then, my father’s driving exploits were laughed off when they should have been condemned.
I still don’t know how he didn’t kill anyone, although he went through the windshield once and survived.
His generation was, I hoped, the last to get away with drunk driving as a kind of larky quirk instead of the deadly, selfish, monstrous, criminal act it really is.
Yes, we now view drunk drivers as morally bankrupt outliers, convinc- ing ourselves we have indeed come a long way.
But I’m positive a lot of people you and I know still drink and drive. They are not criminals, solely because they made it home without incident.
You can rethink a lot in light of this tragedy. Not just your own family’s risk-taking. But even the future of cars.
Last Friday I was watching comedian Bill Maher and Spike Feresten, TV personality and host of a car show, joshing about driverless cars. Maher clearly wanted nothing to do with them. And yet, they agreed: “A driverless car is never going to drink and drive.”
Maybe that’s the future. Remove human failing. Not only zero tolerance, but zero risk. Judith Timson writes weekly about cultural, social and political issues. You can reach her at judith.timson@sympatico.ca and follow her on Twitter @judithtimson.