On a summer Sunday afternoon,
a 36-year-old mother coming home from a weekend
camping trip drives while drunk and under the
influence of marijuana. In her minivan are her
own children and three nieces. For miles, the
car speeds the wrong way on a major highway
before crashing into an oncoming vehicle.
She dies. So do her daughter
and her three nieces, as well as three men in
the other vehicle.
No drunken driving accident in
recent times has garnered the nation's
collective abhorrence and dismay like this one.
Perhaps it is because the driver, Diane Schuler,
was known as a committed mother, a doting aunt
and a successful corporate accountant and
apparently never had been in trouble before with
the law or with the alcohol and marijuana that
killed her and the others.
"Because we have never known
Diane to be anything but a responsible and
caring mother and aunt, this ... raises more
questions than it provides answers for our
family," said her brother, Warren Hance, whose
three girls were among the dead. "Amidst all the
uncertainty and speculation as to how and why
this accident occurred, this is the absolute
last thing that we ever would have expected."
People are asking: How could a
mother do this? Were there any warning signs
that she had a problem? Did other adult family
members know she was intoxicated? If so, why
didn't they stop her from getting behind the
wheel or at least make an effort to prevent the
kids from going along?
Whatever the answers, there is
a fundamental truth that needs no further
explanation. The crash is a stark reminder of
the power of alcohol and other drugs on the
human mind and body. Such substances cause good
people to do bad things and loving people to
cause tremendous harm to themselves and others
they care for or don't know at all. Nobody is
immune to the ravages of the legal drug alcohol
or the illegal drug marijuana.
Sadly, before too long, the
public's fascination and frenzied disbelief over
this crash will dissipate, just as it always
does when somebody dies because of a drunken
driver. As I noted in my column last week,
almost 13,000 people die each year in
alcohol-related traffic accidents. That's one
person every 40 minutes. It seems we have come
to accept alcohol-induced violence on our
roadways, as we do the guns used by criminals to
kill their victims, provided it doesn't happen
to us.
When it does, only the
families of the driver and her victims will
remember day after day that terrible day their
lives were altered forever. And that begs this
question, which I received in an e-mail from my
friend Jean D., who is from Buffalo, N.Y.: "How
will they ever find forgiveness?"
It is easy to hate and
convenient to harbor anger-forged resentments
toward others. No doubt that right now, such
emotions are mixed up in the sheer grief of the
loss these families face. Once that grief fades
— and it will, no matter the depths of their
loss for their loved ones — their challenge will
be to fill the void with forgiveness.
Seeing as our society seems
unwilling to use crashes like this one as
rallying cries to change public attitudes and
public policies around the use and abuse of
alcohol, perhaps the ultimate legacy of this
tragedy is in how the survivors teach us about
forgiveness. All of us have more to learn.
William C. Moyers is the vice president of
external affairs for the Hazelden Foundation and
the author of "Broken," his best-selling
memoirs. Please send your questions to William
Moyers at William@WilliamMoyers.com. To find out
more about William Moyers and read his past
columns, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page
at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS.COM
