What's the worst that could happen? How about the worst you could imagine

"It will never happen to me."It's the common misconception teens and young adults everywhere feel. We think we're invincible. Even though we see tragedy strike hundreds of kids every day, we still convince ourselves that it will never happen to us. But it does happen. And it happened to Bonaventure freshmen Karen Kwiatkowski and Molly Hurley.

Karen had just been offered the spot as a softball team trainer when a head-on collision caused by a drunk driver on March 6, 1988 cut her life short.

Molly was 18 when a car hit her on June 5, 2001. The person behind the wheel was drunk.

These were two freshmen girls just like hundreds of students at St. Bonaventure. They came to school with the same expectations as most come with: to have fun, to learn and to live. Tragically, in the case of Karen and Molly, two people got too caught up in having fun, and because of that, lives were lost.

When Kristy Kibler, Samantha House (my features co-editors) and I decided to take on the huge project of a four-page alcohol spread back in January, we instantly thought to have it released on the Friday of Spring Weekend. It seemed perfectly appropriate. We wanted it to be fun, not preachy, but serious when tackling the bigger, more sinister problems of drinking.

As weeks turned into months and deadline became more than a distant date, we settled into work mode. First we needed story ideas: MERT, Drunk Bus, Bars, etc. Then we needed people to write them. Slowly but surely, stories started to filter in.

Things were starting to come together, and we were
excited about the project and its anticipated release. Everything was in motion, and we got caught up in the logistics and planning of it all. It wasn't until I dropped in to talk to a professor that I was stopped in my tracks and received a reality check.

I was asking for advice on one of the stories to run in the spread. I must have sounded flippant, and I casually used the phrase, "It's going to be really cool."

I didn't receive the reaction I was expecting. So many others had been excited about the project and supported us wholeheartedly. This particular professor did not.

When I asked him why he was so quiet, he said he was thinking about the students he knew who had died from alcohol-related incidents, and "cool" was not the word he would use in association with alcohol.

I never once stopped to think about alcohol as a fatality.

We spent weeks thinking of alcohol-related story ideas, and we came close to the matter with stories about MERT and the Olean General Hospital. But, it was almost as though we forgot alcohol could be fatal, almost as though we thought we were invincible.

I got caught up in the work and forgot there was something much more serious lurking behind each of our headlines, graphics and anecdotes.

People drink. There's no stopping it. It's going to happen regardless of expectations, laws and even death. It's when we get too caught up in having fun that it can lead to larger, more deadly consequences.

Drinking itself isn't the problem. The problem begins when we do it in excess and hurt those around us; it's when we go too far and let it affect others negatively.

It's when we get drunk and get behind a wheel and someone dies.