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Demon drivers : enough is enough

Apparently, there is simply no guarantee that one is safe from maniacal, demon drivers of motor vehicles - whether indoors or outdoors. If the magnitude of this crisis has still not been felt by the authorities, the spine-tingling tragedy at Kadawatha on the Kandy Road, in the wee hours of August 16, should have driven the point home and made everyone concerned to sit up and take notice.

As has already been reported, a car driven at a terrific, hair-raising speed by a person described as a national cricketer, had plunged off the highway, crashed into a lamp post and ploughed into a nearby house. In the process it had killed a mother who had been waiting, along with her son, to board a bus to Anuradhapura. The son had suffered severe injuries.

Meanwhile, in another glaring instance of mindless, daredevil driving, two persons had died on the spot and another injured, at Ragama on Sunday, when a car driver apparently abandoned all caution and had attempted to smuggle himself through a level crossing when the rail gates were closed. The on-coming Kandy-Colombo Intercity express train had reduced the car to matchwood, killing the driver and another occupant of the car.

The issues arising from these incidents are, admittedly, complex and not amenable to simple solutions.

On the one hand, we see here a country which has virtually lost control of itself and is increasingly impervious to the norms of socially responsible conduct and is unmindful of civic concern. Never before has human life been considered so cheap. Those who imagine or are encouraged into imagining that they have a measure of influence and power, exercise it with an inhuman nonchalance.

Could it be otherwise when even some of our leading schools are increasingly compromising their traditional status as repositories of knowledge, wisdom and right conduct, by turning out to be storm centres of conflict - with instances of lawlessness surfacing even among teachers and principals. Things are, indeed, falling apart and the centre is ceasing to hold. On the other hand, it is amply clear that we are foolishly entertaining a highly misleading notion of "progress" or development. The mere clogging of our highways with vehicles and the mechanical and relentless churning-out of "drivers" who are totally unsuited to sit behind the wheel, don't add up to development or progress of any kind.

How is it that so many "nuts" gain access to driving seats of vehicles? When is the law relating to the issuing of driving licences going to be enforced rigorously? Besides, what do the authorities or the concerned State agencies intend to do with "drivers" of vehicles who have proved so dangerous as to take lives and that too in the most insensitive and inhuman of ways? If proved guilty of their crimes are they going to be allowed off the hook with hardly any accountability required of them?

Enough is enough.

The law would need to be enforced rigorously and impartially if the hot heads at large are to be checked and brought to their senses and even a measure of discipline re-introduced into public life.

We also appeal that the laws are rendered doubly effective, if this has not already been done, to check the multi-layered rot which has set in and is depriving us of the breath of wholesome living.

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