The person you are trying to reach is driving right now. Please call back later.

When I got my driver’s license, my parents issued three directives:1. Both hands on the wheel2. No radio blasting3. Gas up yourselfNotice there was no mention of the seat belt. To tell you the truth, I’m not sure my first car (a 1974 Dodge Dart), even had seat belts. Of course, we watched the grisly “look what happens when people don’t wear seat belts” movies in driver’s ed. Then again, most of us started driving those groovy Sherman tank-like full-size cars that our parents OK’d, so belts always seems like a little overkill – pardon the pun.Truth be told, I crashed a few times in the first years – nothing serious (my big hunk o’ steel was barely dented). Some of my friends and co-workers were cautious and buckled up every time.Eventually, I passed the “I am immortal” age, which was right around the same time seat belt use became mandatory. I wore my belt almost all the time, except for the day a big Olds 88 pulled out in front of me. It wasn’t at high speed, but I slammed my head into the windshield and snagged my eyelid on the rear view mirror. Still have the scar.And after that, I wore my belt all the time. Still do. I’m sure local law enforcement is happy to hear that, even though it has nothing to do with the law and everything to do with feeling blood drip down my face.Fast forward several years. I’m still wearing the belt. Of course, I’ve got a babbling 12-year-old back seat driver, a radio AND a five CD changer, a Diet Coke in my hand … and my cell phone is ringing.The National Transportation Safety Board doesn’t want me to answer it. Those people are very wise.I know I’m already distracted, but somehow that phone call seems so important. It’s probably the same important call taken by the woman in the Lexus SUV who nearly backed into me in the Buehler’s parking lot. And it’s definitely as important as the person who ran the red light at South and Market streets downtown, not to mention the guy in the truck who cut me off on U.S. 30.Seriously, unless it’s the President or the Pope or my neurosurgeon, there is no way the call is so important that I need to risk my life and the lives of my passenger and other motorists. And I, the same person who can change clothes, paint my nails and balance my checkbook in four-lane traffic, still for the life of me cannot figure out how to text without ending up in a ditch or in someone else’s trunk.It’s strange, isn’t it, how we’ve become so addicted to immediate access. In days of yore, we waited until we got home or to a pay phone or to our destination to catch up on all those things we missed the 15 minutes we spent driving around. Yet, somehow we did it and the world was still a pretty great place.So, how sad is it that it’s going to take a law to force us to use our common sense (and even then, there still will be oodles of violators). Of course, common sense would lead us to use belts, keep both hands on the wheel and not test the limits of the speedometer in the name of shaving a few minutes off the trip.We’ve evolved considerably as a society since the days of the horse and buggy. That doesn’t mean we’re any smarter.