Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [118]
Likewise, many U.S. high schools have dropped driver’s education classes due to cost-cutting and litigation fears. Schools teach typing, but they no longer do anything to protect your children from the most likely cause of their accidental deaths. In many states, kids now learn to drive from their parents, which is a terrible idea. Teenagers taught by their parents are more than twice as likely to be involved in serious accidents than those taught by professionals, according to a 2007 study by the Texas Transportation Institute.
We’re at risk of devolving, becoming worse at surviving one of the most dangerous things we do. Each year, over 6 million accidents get reported to police in the United States. About forty thousand people die, and about 2 million get hurt. Like all other disasters, car accidents are preventable tragedies. We could have fewer of them if we could train our brains the way Rescorla did. And this is not just an exercise in wishful thinking. There are more Rick Rescorlas out there, trying to teach us to do better. It is possible to speed up our own evolution for survival, even on the freeway.
“Imagine What We Can Practice!”
Late on the night of August 31, 1986, Ronn Langford was awakened by a call telling him his youngest daughter, Dorri, had been in an accident. She was riding in a car in a residential area of Colorado with her boyfriend. As they crossed through an intersection, another car going more than 55 mph ripped through a red light and crashed into the passenger side, T-boning the car. Dorri died instantly. The other car was driven by a nineteen-year-old man who had been drinking. He and everyone else involved survived.
Langford could visualize his daughter’s death with iridescent clarity. He was at the time a race-car driver who had won a string of championships. He understood the power of a car to do harm. And he understood the limitations of the human driver. He knew that the brain had evolved to do many things, and driving was not among them. He had often marveled at the lack of training required of new drivers, and now he was left to suffer for it for the rest of his life.
When he got back from the hospital that morning, Langford remembers, he lay down on his bed. He told himself he had to make a choice: he could be bitter for the rest of his life. He could feel the bile building up in his throat, and he could imagine letting it fill his body and mind. He could picture dedicating his life to hating the idiot who killed his daughter. It was tempting.
Instead, Langford went on a crusade. “You lose your mind. Literally, you lose your mind for a while,” he says now. He sold his share of a real-estate company, which he had started and which had been very successful. Then he opened a school called MasterDrive. He wanted to teach people that handling three thousand pounds of metal in motion is not intuitive. Like Rescorla, he wanted to make people better survivors by rewiring their brains for their modern age.
Langford can come across as a man carefully guarding a large store of anger. “Car-control skills, crash-avoidance maneuvers, the quality of decision making, all these skills are important skills for driving,” he says, starting out quietly. “But nobody teaches it. Nobody learns it!” he says, shouting now. “People are just ignorant. They don’t know what they don’t know. Do SUVs have a different weight ratio than