I hate driving. Every time I get behind the wheel I feel like I’m just daring some higher power to take potshots at me. My mama tells me that that’s a healthy attitude for a teenage driver to have.

“Heck,” she tells me. “I feel the same way about you driving. The fact that you can drive frightens me.”

While these kind words of encouragement have done wonders for my self-confidence, nothing makes me feel better about my driving ability than being chauffeured around by high school students.

Now, a lot of kids are good, safe drivers. Similarly, there are a lot of bad, terrifying drivers. In the past month I’ve had the opportunity to enjoy a wide variety of driving styles, courtesy of McClintock’s very own upperclassmen.

Driving isn’t hard. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to keep a car from careening into another one. A reasonably intelligent orangatan could do it, if it were paying attention. It seems to me, however, that what young, inexperienced drivers struggle with is maintaining focus.

There are plenty of distractions for anyone settling down in the driver’s seat, and these distractions tend to be more important to teenagers. Texting friends, playing disc jockey, chowing down on a taco; the potential for stimuli to divert attention from the road is especially huge for teenagers.

Statistics show that distracted driving leads to accidents. Statistics also show that most people under twenty don’t consider their activities behind the wheel to inhibit their driving ability.

On top of that, teenagers are simply inexperienced drivers.

There, I said it. I tried to soften the blow, but this is the simple truth; teens make bad decisions while driving.

You know, I don’t get it. You can get your license at 16. Why? 16-year-olds don’t pass any particular threshold. Most kids that age are right in the midst of development.

There’s no particular reason for that to be the age when we let kids drive. We might as well let 12-year-olds drive.

Most of our parents have over thirty years of driving experience, and sometimies they still make mistakes. That’s why it scares me when we let some kid, who has a few months of driving with mom or dad in the passenger seat, pilot a two-ton vehicle on the road with everyone else.

I hate driving.