A number of years ago I had the unpleasant experience of attending a collision site and meeting with lawyers and a collision victim who sustained quadriplegia after she was struck while riding her bicycle. She was destined to spend the rest of her life pushing buttons on an advanced wheelchair. She was one of the most beautiful young women I had ever met. And because it was early after her tragedy her beauty was still easy to see. Before the collision she had her life fully ahead of her. Afterwards she had to come to a very dark and difficult reality.
Tragedies like these are what you make of them. And even though this was extremely difficult she eventually managed to take on her challenge and deal with it as best she could. She moved on. Terry Fox had to deal with the same with the same courage.
But there are moments in life where we have an opportunity to change what circumstances lie ahead. If we think clearly, we can understand that certain decisions can be made to prevent irreversible incidents that change our lives forever. That is the scenario of the irreversible consequence of a collision.
The photo above was taken a few days before the writing of this short article. What it shows is a young woman stopped at a busy intersection in east London Ontario and she is preparing to cross the road when the traffic signal turns green for her. She has outfitted herself with things like a water bottle and a reflector on her bike. And she has a bicycle helmet – but the helmet is not on her head – it is hanging from the handlebar of her bike.
Well this is not all that dangerous, one might say, because she is stopped. But the quadriplegic young female was also at a similar London intersection before she was struck, and struck again by a second vehicle, resulting in her painful and irreversible consequences. What would one do as a parent, or close relation, to recognize this scenario and change its outcome? But there are many of us in positions of influence where we could step in when we see something that could result in something terribly wrong. We are police, we educators, we are politicians and we are close relatives of those who make poor decisions without recognizing the eternity of those mistakes. Why are we not prepared to educate those in danger before they make a mistake because they are uniformed?
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