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There's a new super-hero complex in our society. Apparently, many of us think that we can read and write while driving. This is the most stupendous lack of self-insight I have ever seen.
It started innocently enough. On long stretches of empty road, we decide it would be safe enough to make a phone call. Then we realize we're good enough to talk while driving in traffic. Then we decide reading a text message is safe. Before we know it, we're sending text messages while making lefts turn into oncoming traffic. I know because I have been tempted by this slippery slope. We're human, we do stupid things. The problem is that we now have the technology to do supremely stupid things while navigating a 4000-pound weapon around hundreds of people.
How could we be so reckless? It's the lure of self-deception. Any given individual may be able to safely make a phone call in a specific situation, but when you're considering picking up your phone in your car, it's impossible to know if you are that individual, and if this is that situation. You might think you're not deluded, but that jerk who almost ran you and your dog over because he was writing a text doesn't think he's deluded either. If you were him, you wouldn't know. So you have to assume you might be him.
The government has been very generous with our personal liberties here. They have tried trusting us to make our own decisions about what's safe, and we've shown that we are pathologically incapable of using good judgment on this issue. Self-control has its limits, and personal responsibility is not kicking in. Apparently, the allure of believing we are multi-tasking superheroes is irresistible. So the time has come for the legal system to save us from ourselves. I understand that the government should interfere as little as possible with people's private decisions, but this is not a private behavior, and we have abused our own liberty. We must stop playing Russian roulette with our own and other people's lives.
