Mothers Against Drunk Driving No Longer Deserves Your Support

13 Jun, 2008 by John Hawkins

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Mothers Against Drunk Driving has done a lot of good work over the years, particularly with high school students, but this is so far over the line that you can’t even look back and see the line from here,

Many juniors and seniors were driven to tears – a few to near hysterics – May 26 when a uniformed police officer arrived in several classrooms to notify them that a fellow student had been killed in a drunken-driving accident.

The officer read a brief eulogy, placed a rose on the deceased student’s seat, then left the class members to process their thoughts and emotions for the next hour.

The program, titled “Every 15 Minutes,” was designed by Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Its title refers to the frequency in which a person somewhere in the country dies in an alcohol-related traffic accident.

About 10 a.m., students were called to the athletic stadium, where they learned that their classmates had not died. There, a group of seniors, police officers and firefighters staged a startlingly realistic alcohol-induced fatal car crash. The students who had purportedly died portrayed ghostly apparitions encircling the scene.

Though the deception left some teens temporarily confused and angry, if it makes even one student think twice before getting behind the wheel of a car while intoxicated, it is worth the price, said California Highway Patrol Officer Eric Newbury, who orchestrates the program at local high schools.

[…]

“If I sit there and lecture somebody in a nice way, it’s going to go in one ear and out the other,” he said. “In today’s world, where they have all sorts of gore and fantastic things that kids can access on the computer, if you want to compete with that, you have to jar them emotionally.

“I want them to be an emotional wreck. I don’t want them to have to live through this for real.”

This is what happens when people get so fanatical about their cause that they lose perspective. Telling high school students that a friend of theirs is dead is extraordinarily sadistic and cruel.

Furthermore, if someone did the exact same thing to members of MADD that they did to these kids, let’s say by calling a member of the group and telling them that their husband was killed by a drunk driver while going to work, it would be treated as scandalous. Yet, they can do it to a high school full of kids and people are supposed to give them a pat on the back for coming up with a way to “jar them emotionally?”

Until MADD permanently stops this practice and apologizes for what they’ve done, I’d encourage you not to donate a dime to them, not to support them, and forward this post to everybody you know so that they can do the same. The ends don’t always justify the means and MADD needs to be taught that.

Hat tip to Karol Sheinin at Alarming News for the story.