COMMENTARY>>Consider the consequences before you act

By Col. Donald Dickerson
314th Maintenance Group commander

Every day, we make thousands of decisions, most with very little conscious thought. If I asked you if you wanted to go to lunch today, you’d probably decide and answer immediately.

We give other decisions, like buying a new vehicle or home, a great deal of careful deliberation.

Unless it’s obviously of great magnitude, how often do you stop and consider the consequences of your decisions? Even the decisions we make in the blink of an eye can have life changing, sometimes life ending impact.

On Labor Day weekend some years back, two Airmen in the squadron I commanded made a decision to go race their cars in the middle of the night on a straight stretch of road near our base. Two Airmen from other squadrons elected to ride along.

After several runs down a quarter-mile course they’d measured and marked with cones, they stopped to chat about their performance.

After the conversation, they got in their cars to go back to base. One driver decided he wasn’t through racing and accelerated to more than 110 mph. He went off the right side of the road, overcorrected, shot off the left side of the road, spun and impacted a tree while moving backward at more than 80 mph. His 19-year old passenger died immediately.

The driver died in the emergency room, right in front of me, a few hours later.

Do you think the driver would have made a different decision had he spent more than a second thinking about the consequences before he chose to press the gas pedal to the floor?

Would the passenger have chosen to go racing with them had he given the decision more thought? We’ll never know.

How often have you made a decision to do something like that without considering what could go wrong?

Countless times since that terrible night, I’ve dealt with people who were facing failing marriages, financial crisis, career problems or injuries because of their failure to think before they acted.

I’m baffled when I watch people who spend five minutes trying to decide what to order at Starbucks make a decision to do something so risky it puts their future in jeopardy without a second thought.

Every decision we make has consequences. Think about those consequences before you act and encourage those around you to do the same. Spontaneity is great, but so is not going through life thinking how much better it would be if only you had thought before making a bad decision.