Spread the Word—You Have the Power. (No, really, you do.)

As you’ll likely know by now, U Got Brains is hold­ing a statewide com­pe­ti­tion between nine­teen “cham­pion” schools in New Jer­sey, with each school cre­at­ing a cam­paign to pro­mote safe dri­ving. And fun­nily enough, teens in the schools are begin­ning to actu­ally take notice.

For some, it’s just a ques­tion of ask­ing another friend—“wait what’s up with all the sud­den fly­ers?” and for oth­ers, it’s the gift of a free shirt or bracelet from a cam­paign orga­nizer; but grad­u­ally, the stu­dents in the schools are start­ing to real­ize that this is a big deal— and it’s actu­ally hap­pen­ing at their school.

Adults can come in and teach stu­dents about safe dri­ving all they want. Some speeches are funny or witty, while oth­ers can be elo­quent, touch­ing, or pow­er­ful. But no mat­ter how won­der­ful their speeches are, many stu­dents just don’t lis­ten. Maybe they’ll lis­ten for the period, maybe they’ll lis­ten for a few days—but even­tu­ally, the major­ity will go back to the far eas­ier meth­ods of tex­ting out quick replies, fore­go­ing the annoy­ing seat belt, and tak­ing that ille­gal drink at parties.

How­ever, imag­ine the con­cepts of dri­ving in full con­trol becom­ing the new trend. Of stu­dents hit­ting friends over the heads (not lit­er­ally! …well, depend­ing on how close the friend is) for dri­ving idi­ot­i­cally, friends telling friends “I love you but I’d really rather not risk my life on your skills at look­ing at the road and at your phone at the same time”, upper­class­men cre­at­ing prece­dents that the under­class­men won’t dare to break in the future—essentially, keep­ing smart in and stu­pid out.

We can do this, and the U Got Brains com­pe­ti­tion is one step towards this goal, this hope. If teenagers become the ones to spread the word and tell each other exactly how stu­pid stu­pid is, then they stand the chance of actu­ally being heard and even lis­tened to by peers. We as teens have adopted plenty of strange ideas in the past—so why not adopt a life-saving one, this time, instead?

> Find out what the UGot­Brains Cham­pion School Project is and see who is participating