--- DWI is the planned topic of the week. If you don't care or don't
want to read, please, by all means skip it and I hope you come back
when I'm done. First, though, I felt I should give a word of warning.
If I sound a bit brusque and uncaring you should not take my attitude
to mean that I don't care about the problem of drunken driving. I do
care about it. Quite a bit. Ask anyone who's ever had to bail out a
loved one who had been charged with that particular offense. I can tell
from experience that your first thought is Thank God they didn't kill someone! Thank God they're not hurt! Which is rapidly followed up with But they sure as hell don't have long to live!
The husband has been pulled over for this six times since we were married. Six
times. I know. A horrible recidivism rate. He should, by all rights, be
locked up until kingdom come---provided he'd hurt someone whilst
driving drunk. If that had been the case, that key would have been in
the garbage can faster than you could spit and I would have been the
one who'd have thrown it there. But he never hurt anyone. The potential
for harm was there, yes. I'm not denying that one little bit, but
actual harm never occurred. The worst that ever happened while he drove
drunk was that he hit a slick spot and went into the ditch. That's it.
There was no horrific smashing of parked cars. No little kids were
mowed down in the roadway. No buses jampacked with nuns were run off
the road. None of those things ever occurred. But let's be honest about
the situation: when I wrote on early Friday morning that the husband
had been charged with drunk driving, that was what you thought he'd done. Wasn't it? You'd lumped him into the category of stupid person who gets behind the wheel and does horrible things when they're incapacitated
category. I'm sure you did. It's not your fault. That's what everyone
from Congress to our local politicians to MADD wants us to think about
drunk drivers; that they're scary individuals who don't giving a
flaming hoot about other people. They didn't care enough to call a cab.
They didn't care enough to designate a driver. They just don't care about anyone but themselves!
I am here to tell you that this is not the case. At least it's not with
the husband. He made bad choices. He did. I'm not denying this one
little bit. Every time I got the call to come and bail him out I
thanked God no one had lost their life or their livelihood because the
husband, God love him, was too stupid to see that he couldn't handle
booze and needed to quit. Every time he went out thereafter, I lived
with the horrible knowledge that maybe the only thing that was going to
stop him from drinking was that he would kill someone whilst driving
drunk. That the loss of someone else's life would be his wake up call
and it would be too late for everything. I had horrible nights when he
would do this. It wasn't very often. Once or twice a month. But those
nights were interminable. And the relief was overwhelming when he
finally would walk into the apartment---inebriated, but alive. I once
read that life happens one day at a time, like water dripping on a
stone; that no one deserves all the good or the bad they come across in
their life, and this is how I feel about the husband's alcoholism. So,
please, whatever you take out of this little diatribe, don't think I
don't care. I do. More than I can ever express. But it's also this
care, this feeling, or whatever you want to call it, that is the source
of my incredulity with the laws. This diatribe is not the work of a
hard bitten woman who's had to deal with too much legal hassle, in
other words. While the law has not not played fair, in my opinion, by
stacking the deck against the accused, I do see the need for there to
be laws against drunk driving in the first place. But I also see the
need for a better solution to the problem of drunken driving than the
one we have in place. It may work to deter the social drinkers, but as
the statistics show, the laws don't make a dent in the actual deaths
that occur as a result of drunken driving. We're past the stage where
we need ads during the Super Bowl to deter social drinkers from being
stupid. They know not to be stupid. We don't need to lower the legal
limit to .08. That's not going to do anything when the statistics show
that the average BAC of someone who's involved in an alcohol related
fatality is .17. We're at the stage that no one wants to touch because
no one knows how to resolve it. People deserve better---both the
accused and the people who have lost loved ones because of drunken
driving.