Like most, reading “hit and run” in the news makes me stop in my tracks. In early November, upon a double take on such a headline, I read alongside these first ugly words, “wheelchair.” It’s always hard to imagine what goes through someone’s head when they commit such an act, but the invovement of someone so vulnerable is truly terrible.
A 19 year-old Surrey man was hit by a car for the second time in his life, on Tuesday, November 5. Due to his brittle bone disease that requires his use of a power wheelchair, he suffered 5 broken bones after being hit and thrown from his wheelchair. The remorseless driver fled the scene, while the man ended up in the hospital.
Hit and runs are a taboo subject, something people would rather not talk or think about. It’s obviously something both society and the law oppose, yet it still happens much too frequently. Maybe the problem lies with driver attitudes. Pedestrians are often disregarded, or regarded with disdain by those driving their large and powerful vehicles. Drivers are often too impatient to wait for someone to move down a street or cross a road.
However, impatience is no rational excuse. It is completely acceptable for a pedestrian, in this case a wheelchair user, to travel on the side of the road if there is no sidewalk, or a sidewalk unfit for a power wheelchair. As a wheelchair user myself, I know how tricky navigating sidewalks in the lower mainland can be, and how inconvenient it can be to travel where there are none.
I can’t begin to imagine how awful the driver must feel in a hit and run accident. It’s one thing to hit another vehicle on the road, to cause damage to someone else’s property, or scare them in the process. But this person hit another human being with his vehicle. The person was in control, and suddenly lost it, inflicting incomprehensible hurt and injury to someone who never meant to have any interaction with him or her.
A wheelchair makes the situation all the worse. People automatically feel differently towards someone in a wheelchair, whether they mean to or not. That’s a part of our life we wheelchair users grow to accept. Any driver with humane qualities at all would feel even worse for hurting someone who already struggles extra hard in life, adding more hardship to that which they already endure.
In the moment of such an event, fear would be overwhelming. A driver would panic, no matter who they are or what circumstances caused the accident. In an almost out-of-body experience, undoubtedly the natural instinct would be to flee. There would be overwhelming emotions over hitting someone, especially someone who obviously won’t recover, or possibly survive, with the same ease as others.
As a society, we are being conditioned to take less and less responsibility for our actions. How long would it take you to own up to your illegal and morally wrongful actions? Would it take a drive around the block, or a day to realize what really happened? Would you not own up at all?
We’ll see where this driver’s moral compass takes him or her.
