There Oughtta be Laws to Regulate Common Sense!

It’s a sad statement about human nature when there has to be a discussion about passing a law to prohibit sending text messages while driving. Common sense tells us that it’s dangerous to take your eyes off the road while you’re driving a car. Unfortunately, it’s very common for drivers to be distracted for multiple reasons – texting, dialing a phone number, talking on the phone, talking with one of your passengers, looking at something outside, eating, reading a map, etc. If we don’t have enough common sense to pay attention to our driving, maybe we should make it illegal to do any of the activities that distract us in our cars. The tricky part is that the people who act carelessly are not just endangering themselves, but they impact other people out on the roads. For that reason, I would support a law against texting while driving as well as laws requiring the use of hands-free cell phone devices when you’re driving a car. If it will save more lives, it’s worth it.

We Fear Change

People like to complain when something is altered, even when it’s an arguably trivial makeover. I saw an article this week about how Ikea changed the font of the lettering in their catalog, and thousands of people wrote to complain about it. One group even started a petition against the change! I don’t really understand why anyone would care all that much about something seemingly insignificant like that. When Facebook changed the look of their homepage about 6 months ago, there was a giant uproar from a lot of people who were opposed to the change. Why does it matter? Can you remember now what it looked like prior to the update? Why are we so afraid to try new things? Changes like that stir up our comfortable routine, but we need to prioritize which changes are scary and significant and which ones are really not a big deal. If people give themselves time to adjust to something different, they will be able to accept it or even grow to like it after a while. It’s too bad we waste so much energy fighting the small changes.