If you have been drinking, you do not drive. Not “just a short distance”, not “just this once”. You don’t.

HE was in his 30s. A father of three. His children are between nine and two years old – ages that still need bedtime stories, steady hands and a father who comes home.

But he won’t.

Somewhere along a road in Klang, a life ended in an instant. Not because of fate, not because of some unavoidable tragedy but because someone made a decision that should never have been made – to get behind the wheel when they were not in control.

And now, three children will grow up with a silence that will follow them for the rest of their lives.

This is the part that should stop us in our tracks. Not the outrage that briefly floods social media, not the arguments that quickly turn ugly – but the human cost. A family altered forever. A future that has been quietly, violently taken away.

Yet, almost as predictably as the tragedy itself, the conversation has drifted elsewhere. Away from accountability and towards race.

There is something deeply unsettling about how quickly we reach for stereotypes when confronted with grief.

The whispers become louder, the assumptions more confident as if pinning blame on a community somehow makes the loss easier to process. As if saying “this is what they are like” absolves the rest of us from confronting a much harder truth.

But a drunk driver is not a race.

Recklessness is not cultural.

And irresponsibility does not belong to any one community.

We have seen too many lives lost on Malaysian roads to pretend this is an isolated incident. Not just from alcohol but from drugs, from dangerous levels of fatigue, from the quiet arrogance of thinking “I can manage”.

Each case is reported, mourned, debated – and then, slowly, forgotten. Until the next name replaces the last.

But for the families left behind, there is no forgetting.

Three children will grow up measuring time differently now – before and after. Before their father left home and after he never returned. The nine-year-old will understand enough to feel the weight of absence. The two-year-old may not remember his face, only stories told by others. And in between, a childhood reshaped by loss.

This is why the conversation cannot afford to be shallow.

It is not enough to condemn drunk driving in passing, only to return to the same habits the next weekend. It is not enough to treat each incident as a headline detached from the next. Because the truth is painfully simple – these deaths are preventable.

No one is asking for perfection. People will go out, they will drink, they will celebrate. That is part of life. But responsibility does not end where convenience begins.

If you have been drinking, you do not drive. Not “just a short distance”, not “just this once”. You don’t.

There are choices. Call a ride. Sit it out. Leave your car behind. Go with someone who is sober. Small decisions, made in ordinary moments, that carry the weight of life and death.

And still, too often, we choose otherwise.

Perhaps because nothing has gone wrong before. Perhaps because we believe we are different. Until one day, we are not.

And someone else pays the price.

What we owe this man – this father – is not noise. It is not division. It is not the recycling of tired narratives that pit one community against another. What we owe him is something far more difficult: a shift in how we think and how we act.

Because the road does not care who you are.

It does not care what language you speak or what name you carry, or what assumptions others make about you. It only responds to what you do in that moment behind the wheel.

And in that moment, one decision can destroy everything.

Tonight, somewhere, someone will make that same calculation. They will weigh inconvenience against risk and convince themselves they are capable. That nothing will happen. That they will make it home.

For the sake of the three children who no longer have their father, we have to hope they choose differently.

We have to demand that they do.

Because we cannot keep standing at the edge of the same grief, over and over again, pretending it is new.

It isn’t.

And the cost is far too high.

Hashini Kavishtri Kannan is the assistant news editor at theSun.

Comments: letters@thesundaily.com

 The Sun Malaysia