Street Racing

Street Racing

It is the primal urge amongst male teenagers; put the pedal to the floor and see who wins. It is street racing and it has caught on in the U.S. over the past decade as one of the worst influences on young impressionable minds today. The feeling you get when your going fast cannot be replaced by any other stimulant known to man. It's flashy, fun, and exciting until it goes wrong. The need for speed is increasing along with speed related deaths and accidents. Could modern culture have an effect on this with a series of movies and games?

The series is "The Fast and the Furious." The first two installments of the series of three movies revolve around drag racing in the streets of big cities with upgraded import cars. All of the stunts in the movie were performed by trained professionals in a closed environment. However, in the movies the stunt drivers always make things look so simple and that makes kids believe that they themselves can race and shoot through traffic at speeds peaking at or above 100 miles per hour and escape without a scratch. Teens do not seem to realize that only in the movies do people pull off wild and inhuman stunts and live to tell about it the next day.

Street racing is very dangerous. It can and has claimed the lives of hundreds of innocent people around the world. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration

said that connecting fatal crashes to street racing is difficult but that the year the first movie came out, at least 135 people died in accidents from possible races. That is almost twice as many as the year before. The stats speak for themselves. Since the movies release a noticeable increase in deaths and other traffic related accidents has come about. Can all of this be blamed on just movies alone?

Another street racing oriented form of entertainment is video games. EA, one of the most prominent game makers has gotten into the fad by producing the series "Need for Speed." The market for these kinds of games are directed towards teenage drivers which all involve import or domestic cars that have been modified to be fast, handle well, and look good. The object of these games is to drive around racing other cars in the streets of urban areas. In these forms of entertainment if you make a mistake or crash, you just come back to life and start all over again, but the same is not to be said