Use your Road Sense
Lilloet News by Paul Dickinson
Standing before the Grade 11 and Grade 12 students at Lillooet Secondary School, road sense speaker Cara Johnston-Filler didn’t pull any punches.
“I have no right to tell you how to live your life,” she told the crowd of 100 students. “It’s up to you to make your choices. Hopefully, today, I can tell you about some choices that you might not even know you had.”
Filler acknowledged that too often, students are simply told what to do and what not to do by adults.
“Your teachers just want to see you get old like them,” she joked. “You should be able to have kids and tell them about how you walked five kilometers to school, in the snow, uphill both ways.”
But while Filler’s enthusiasm and relaxed style had students laughing, her message was serious.
Cara’s identical twin sister, Mairin Johnston, was killed in a car crash, just one day after the girls’ 18th birthday. Mairin’s boyfriend, who had only minor injuries, was driving more than three times the posted speed limit when he lost control of his car and crashed into another vehicle.
“My sister became a statistic,” said Filler. “I’m sick and tired of car crashes being the number one killer of youth.”
Two months after the death of her twin sister, Cara stood in front of her first audience, and began speaking to schools about the consequences of unsafe driving. After years of traveling across the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, she has told her story thousands of times to hundreds of thousands of students.
Filler said the use of the word “accident” for motor vehicle crashes is misleading.
“An accident means it was unpreventable,” she said. “So many car crashes are preventable.”
Read more about Paul’s story of Cara’s presentation in this weeks edition of the BRLN, available now on newsstands.