By Brittany Jahn
Throughout the week ASB has worked hard to make Red Ribbon Week an educational and thought-provoking experience at CCA. This past Tuesday their hard work paid off when world-renowned speaker Jason Barber visited CCA to speak out against drunk driving. As his speech began it was unsure which route his words would take, but as Barber talked about drunk driving and his own experiences, the motivational speech turns into an emotional life story.
Barber, who grew up in southern California and joined the military after high school, has a tired expression on his face. It is a face that has been somewhere, a face that knows something, a face that has something to say. He begins his speech by introducing himself, his cause and his motives. He then transitions with a poem called Death of an Innocent, which chronicles the death of a teenage girl. When Barber finishes reading the poem the Proscenium Theater is silent. One second. Two seconds. Three seconds. The three second pause feels like a lifetime and Barber speaks again. The slideshow changes and a picture of a teenage girl consumes our thoughts. Barber speaks and we learn that the poem was about her. Not specifically her, but what happened to her: what happened to her future, what happened to her family, what happened to her life.
The slide changes again. This time the picture is of a boy named Aaron. Age fifteen, freckled face, goofy smile, shaggy hair. A teenage boy. One who, like 14,000 other people each year, was killed by a drunk driver. As Barber begins to talk about Aaron’s life, Barber’s voice softens again. You can tell he knew the boy. The slideshow changes again and there is a snapshot of Aaron with Barber. It is a picture taken in a photo booth, the type that prints a sheet of four photos in a matter of seconds and captures each moment perfectly.
Aaron was Barber’s younger brother who was killed 19 years ago by a drunk driver. Aaron was thrown from the passenger’s seat; his brother, Barber, sat in the driver’s seat, forced to watch as he saw his brother’s goofy smile fade away.
When Barber pauses to take a breath from his tragic story, the proscenium theater is silent. But no one turns their head to their neighbor, no one looks down at their phone praying for cell service, all eyes are on Barber, the person whose life it is, who has had to live with the second degree murder of his little brother.
When Barber finishes his story he has no doubt left an impact on the students in the room. He has shared with this audience, as he has with countless others across the nation, the darkest moment of his life. It is heartbreaking to picture yourself in his shoes. It is impossible to imagine telling such a tragic story and relieving the night he killed his brother, over and over again. He did that for us. He did that to teach us how much one choice, one decision, made in one split second can ruin your entire life. As Barber states and reiterates throughout his speech, “Drunk driving is not an accident, drunk driving is a choice.”
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