Candace Owens, Candice Bergen. Candace…Lightener? Never heard of her. But she changed the world. Really.
Social justice movements can and do change the world, including public perception, the law, and eventual outcomes for many millions of us. That’s a fact. They will continue to do so – change the world for the better – and, as in Candace Lightener’s case, they will in future be sparked by the love and pain of a single individual.
Lightner, as so many who have founded social justice movements, came to her advocacy unwillingly and without a history in founding anything, let alone a movement that has proven successful both here and abroad. But the power of a single individual committed to making a difference is undeniable.
Candace Lightener founded MADD: Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Now you know.
Lightner was a real estate agent, as well as a divorced single mother trying to keep three kids fed, housed, and happy. Her twin daughters and son were her universe. Not only was she too busy to care about politics, Lightener had never even registered to vote. She was another working mom trying to make ends meet, and she had zero political or business ties to anyone in a position of power.
It was a sunny day in May of 1980 in beautiful Southern California; Lightener’s 13-year-old daughter Cari was walking to a church carnival with a friend. Cari was a softball star who was already dreaming about following her mom into real estate; she was also a mere four minutes older than her twin sister Serena.
Then, a forty-six year old with four DUI arrests and three prior convictions for drunk driving named Clarence Busch came barreling down the street; he’d been drinking for hours. Busch had been arrested for another drunk driving hit-and-run a mere 48 hours earlier, but despite his truly horrendous record, Busch was out on bail and behind the wheel of a car with a valid license in hand.
He hit Cari. The impact threw her body 125 feet. Her shoes remained on the sidewalk where she’d been standing. Her friend stood there screaming in shock. Cari Lightener’s injuries were so severe and catastrophic that doctors couldn’t harvest her organs.
Clarence Busch? Not only did he not stop after hitting Cari Lightener, he didn’t even slow down.
When police finally caught Busch, and Candace learned of his history of drunk driving, she asked law enforcement what would happen to him. They told her the truth: probably nothing. At the time, drunk drivers almost never faced serious consequences. Ironically, my own drivers’ ed. teacher was killed by a drunk driver; the drunk in that case was also a repeat offender; he had previously put a young woman into a wheelchair for life after hitting her while driving drunk, but there he was, out driving and damaging multiple lives again.
This was also in the ‘good old days’ of the 1980s. A local judge fined the drunk driver in that case $300, which he called ‘a serious amount’ with regard to punishment. Tell that, why don’t you, to his widow. But. That’s how the system worked in the U.S. in the 1980s. Speaking of which, in the UK, if you’re involved in a vehicular death while driving drunk, your license is automatically pulled for life. If the pedestrian is ‘only’ hit, you still lose your license for a minimum of a YEAR, drunk or not. Why can’t we have nice things like that in the U.S.?!! Sigh.
Back to the case in hand. Four days after burying her eldest child, Candace Lightener sat down founded MADD: Mothers Against Drunk Drivers. She quit her job, burned through her savings, and spent Cari’s life insurance money to make ends meet while the organization was in its infancy. Within eight weeks of that day, Lightener was marching on the White House with a hundred other grieving moms.
She coined a phrase that changed everything, calling drunk driving ‘the only socially accepted form of homicide,’ repeating it everywhere until people finally understood that her daughter’s death was not an accident, it was murder with a car.
In 1984, Candace Lightener stood beside President Reagan as he signed a federal law raising the drinking age to 21 nationwide. Every single state complied (imagine that!). MADD also pushed the legal limit for driving while under the influence down to 0.08, made ‘designated drivers’ a part of American vocabulary and life, and forced ignition interlock devices into law.
Clarence Busch only served 21 months, getting out to drive drunk again multiple times. But because of the movement Candace built in her grief, drunk driving deaths dropped from 25,000 annually in 1980 to around 10,000 by 2013, which means nearly 400,000 lives had been saved.
So, now you know. For more on MADD, which has a high rating for transparency and accountability, and a less stellar rating from Charity Watch (monitoring the ratio of spending on targeted programming versus salaries and fund raising efforts), the wiki is linked below. It’s notable one of MADD’s primary critics over the last several decades is a white guy from Indiana, a former Fox News journalist and libertarian. I always take criticisms from white male libertarians with a salt block, but perhaps that’s just me…