Teens, suicide, and safe driving

I stood outside my house with two of my neighbours the other day discussing the tragedy of teens committing suicide. Apparently there was an Internet ‘pact’ made by about twenty local teenagers to commit suicide on Christmas Day. Horrific. Thank God it didn’t go ahead, for whatever reason, but one of my neighbours was going to a tangi for one teenager who did commit suicide at Christmas. And talked about another who’d killed herself because of text message bullying. The girl who’d done the most bullying had turned up at the tangi for that girl, which my neighbour thought was actually brave…but then had killed herself a few days later.

It’s unbelievable. The other neighbour and I felt it was that these kids don’t have a sense of the reality of death, that once you’re gone, you’re gone. I remember years ago a boy hanged himself because he’d had an argument with his father. Hanged himself! Why would you go and do that to spite someone? There’s some strange evil process at work in all this. I feel that it’s more than just kids deciding this is the thing to do. Behind it, I sense, there’s a supernatural factor that’s inciting this kind of unreasonable behaviour.

And then there are kids who kill themselves on the road. You can kind of understand this better: kids have far less judgement in cars than more experienced drivers. They have a sense of being bullet-proof, and time and again they’ve proved their not. I noted that there was a site in the States where they have a number of tips for teenage drivers. Getting the teenagers to pay attention is, of course, the issue.

The site was brought to my attention by a car insurance company who offer a cheap car insurance quote. They offer the ability to shop for car insurance – a kind of brokerage service online. They also have a list of interesting question and answer topics: Can auto insurance save the environment, for instance, which is ‘reprinted’ from an article in the Charleston Gazette dated 28th December, 2006. Worth a look.