Last night I attended a M.A.D.D. Victim’s Awareness Panel. This was a real eye opening experience – two fold. Fortunately Lynnsey Eakins (M.A.D.D. WPB Chapter) allowed me to enter as a volunteer. This meeting is usually reserved, and mandated by the court system, for first-time DUI offenders to listen to victims, lawyer (for both sides) all intended in persuading the offenders from driving under the influence. <\/p>\n
I say that it was eye opening – two fold – because listening to the victims perspective is really sad & I can be compassionate to them. Listening to CD tell us how a drunk driver drove head-on into her daughter’s car, was very heart – wrenching. Her only child was no longer alive. <\/p>\n
But standing outside waiting for M.A.D.D. to open the doors, I got a different perspective. One of the offenders was chatting with several others. He was bragging that he’s been here before (mind you, it’s only for first time offenders) & telling everybody in his group, what to expect. “They will put an old man in a wheelchair in front of the group. He will tell us how a drunk driver took his legs & his wife. But all I know is that I wasn’t the one who did it – otherwise I don’t give a sh*t!” – Everybody laughs a nervous laugh.<\/p>\n
Now this is why I am here – yes I am mad!! I want to not only assist the family heal, but to create awareness so that this does not happen again. This story made me mad & it made me realize that there are some real ignorant jerks out there, that I may never reach – until it happens to them. <\/p>\n
I wish them luck & pray that they are not the next ones to cause a crash because of their choice to remain ignorant.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last night I attended a M.A.D.D. Victim’s Awareness Panel. This was a real eye opening experience – two fold. Fortunately Lynnsey Eakins (M.A.D.D. WPB Chapter) allowed me to enter as a volunteer. This meeting is usually reserved, and mandated by the court system, for first-time DUI offenders to listen to victims, lawyer (for both sides) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3,9,31,30,20],"class_list":["post-53","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-forgiveness","tag-grief","tag-politics","tag-project","tag-selp"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/descansos.psolis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/descansos.psolis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/descansos.psolis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/descansos.psolis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/descansos.psolis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/descansos.psolis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/descansos.psolis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/descansos.psolis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/descansos.psolis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}