It’s the end of the school year. That means grad parties are coming, bonfires, parties, and long nights with friends. But that also means alcohol. Everybody drinks now, people that are of age and people that are underage, and there's really no stopping it. The one thing that I’m asking is please don’t drink and drive, it’s not worth it.

Would you rather have to call your parents to tell them you drank too much and need a ride or that you’re sleeping somewhere, or would you rather them be woken up by the police because they need to identify the body? Drinking and driving is never okay. There’s nothing you could possibly say to justify it, there just isn’t.

Not only are you putting your own life at risk but you’re putting every other person on the roads lives at risk.

The average weight of a car is three to four thousand pounds. It’s a big metal wrecking ball that some people can’t even drive properly when they’re sober. Now let’s throw alcohol into the mix. Let's say you decide to drink and drive anyway, and you miraculously make it home. Great! You made it! (sarcasm). You drove that wrecking ball down the street as your vision blurred and the world began to tilt. You can’t see straight! But somehow you made it.

Now, suppose you didn’t make it home. Suppose on your way home you were so drunk that you didn’t know which way was up. You didn’t realize that your car had drifted into oncoming traffic, and before you knew it you plowed head-on into another car. In that car was a family. Keyword was. They’re not a family anymore because you killed them. You, the person who decided drunk driving was a good idea, killed them. Can you imagine what that would do to you? Can you imagine living with that guilt for the rest of your life? Can you imagine the pain the rest of their family would be going through?

My mom knows I drink. Every time I go out and she knows there will be alcohol, she tells me the same story. Back in 1998, a close family friend of ours was killed in a drunk driving accident. The woman who killed him was driving eighty-eight miles per hour coming around a corner, she lost control of the car and crashed into him head-on. He was ejected from his car and landed in a ditch on the side of the road. Upon the paramedic's arrival, he was rushed to the hospital where he was put on life support. He died the next day after it was determined he would never wake up. He was twenty years old. An innocent twenty-year-old kid lost his life because of a person's selfish decision to drive drunk. He and his family were only one of the thousands upon thousands of families impacted every day by drunk drivers.

I was only two at the time of his death so I didn’t understand, but I know it was hard for my family, and especially his. To this day, twenty years later, talking about it still makes my mom emotional. That’s the impact drunk driving has on families. Twenty years later and it still hurts them because he was taken away too soon. He didn’t deserve to be taken like that, and that lady deserved way more than the four years jail time she got.

If you’re out somewhere and you’re too drunk to drive, leave your car and get a ride, stay somewhere, whatever you have to do just do it. Your car will still be there in the morning for you to go back and get.

Save a life, save your life, it’s always better to be safe than sorry.