I wish to convey my sincere condolences to the families of all those who met their deaths caused by tragic accidents on our roads during the festive season. May they and we all find strength at this difficult time.
As we all grapple with the crippling number of deaths, it is easy to blame the so-called “black-spots” for their occurrence. To do this would be to pretend that some drivers do not know that we are legally required to observe, obey and ensure others also observe and obey the traffic code. Wrong!.
We do know. In fact, we appreciate the thinking behind traffic rules. To ignore them would be playing Russian roulette on the roads especially during the festive season. You would think that all drivers transporting human beings, know and respect this, but alas!
So the issue is not that we do not know the danger we put ourselves in when we do not take due care on the roads. It isn’t even that we do not know the set speed limits that are also legal requirements. There is the matter of daily revenue targets set for drivers by car-owners.
Dear drivers, by speeding and continually raising the death toll on our roads we still consider you careless, insensitive to our families and even inhuman — if you survive the accidents yourselves, that is.
Why do we do things like these? It certainly is not very profitable to end up with a pile of dead bodies and a mangled wreck of a bus because of a set daily revenue target now, or is it? That’s for the bus owners to respond to.
Allow me to attempt an explanation as to why we do things that we definitely know we shouldn’t. The widest gap in the whole world lies between what we know and what we actually do. I’m sure you’ve had plenty of unfortunate situations where you’ve wondered how it is that a well-informed, educated, exposed and experienced person could make some very pedestrian mistakes. It is this very gap. It is called the Knowing-Doing Gap.
We know better, but we ignore our knowledge and act in the exact opposite way. Why bother acquiring the knowledge in the first place? Sounds like the best definition of madness, doesn’t it? It is simply ignorance of how it is that we create the situations in our lives (or deaths in this unfortunate instance).
When we acquire knowledge from others or generate our own ideas, they are lodged in our conscious mind. Our conscious mind being objective, can accept or reject any idea fed to it.
All our knowledge stays here but is completely useless to us until we internalise it. Any information or idea that is accepted by our conscious mind is then passed on to our sub-conscious mind. Being subjective, our sub-conscious mind must accept any information passed onto it by our conscious mind. It has no ability to evaluate or reject.
It is our sub-conscious mind through internalisation of ideas that instructs our physical bodies to act through our emotions. We then proceed to do the things we do and the universe – our environment — reacts back.
It is this action-reaction process that results in our current circumstances. Bear in mind that the reactions we receive from the universe are always in direct proportion to our actions.
You se, by the natural law of causation, nothing just happens. The “black-spots” on their own do not get into buses slaughtering passengers in their wake.
Those unfortunate deaths are cause by drivers. That said, drivers who throw all caution to the wind on our roads in spite of the danger they are aware of but choose to ignore cannot blame “black-spots”. Further, they refuse to take responsibility for their careless driving — if they make it out alive, that is.
It is not about the daily set targets either. The target-wielding bus owner wants money, not a broken bus, dead bodies and mourning families. We all want to believe that if a person was smart enough to pass a driving test, he/she wants to use it for some benefit that can obviously not be gained by dying or killing passengers on the roads.
We have got to understand that all the caution we fail to observe on the roads only ends up in greater liability, not revenue. It doesn’t matter how menacing the bus owner is when demanding for revenues. Our undying position as consumers of public transportation is that no human life is worth it.
Choose to be at the cause of the effects in your life – even if you no longer want to live, we would like our loved ones arriving alive.
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