This is a bit of a long one. It's very informal so don't mind spelling or grammar mistakes haha. Please give me your thoughts past and present participants!!! Feel free to jump to the end (spoilers if you care about being spoiled)...
So today I went to the bstreetsmart event at the Qudos Bank stadium. It lasted from around 9:30 to 2:30 for most schools (some left early) and had two main parts. The first was a live enactment of the events directly after a car crash occurs. It went for the whole morning session (Unless I'm misremembering). During lunch there were some stalls but the crowd was too big (autism lmaoooo) so I just went back to my seat to eat my lunch. We spent the remainder of the event listening to accounts from and related to car crash victims. I would also like to note how immature a good deal of the students acted during a few of the presentations, with nonsense clapping which was entirely innapropriate...
The first thing I'll say is that I was not at all prepared for how brutal the topics were going to be. Obviously there was some level of 'this will be serious shit' but I hadn't realised that it would be as intense as it was. When they gave the warning about 1. if it's too distressing leave, and 2. there are counsellors (or something) are the doors, I disregarded it as the usual thing that happens in schools where its really not that graphic and they only say that because they have to. Oh how wrong I was.
FIRST PART After the Careflight hospital dude introduced himself they segued into a live and incredibly realistic (graphic) interpretation of a car crash. They set it up with a small audio clip that gave us the backstory and then when the lights came back on the smashed vehicle (it was 'driven' into a powerpole) was revealed. And so was the dead body (and a biker guy). The camera zoomed into the front seat of the car to give us a full display of an enormous gash on the passenger seat and the driver who is mostly unharmed. I'll just cut most of the story out but one girl didn't have her seatbelt on and she went flying through the windscreen and there was a pool of blood on the ground around her where she had 'skidded' along the ground. Additionally, the biker (which caused them to swerve) is lying on the ground and at one point the camera zooms in on his leg which is showing the bone. At some point, ambulances arrive and they proceed to 'revive' the passenger by using some kind of neck grip which allows her to cough up blood and so she wakes up. The rest of the live story is the police interviewing the driver and cutting the passenger out of the car. Also, the passenger and biker are screaming in pain constantly and both have to be moved into ambulances so there was that.
They then cut to (once at a time) three videos: 1. where the passenger's 'recovery' is shown, 2. where the driver is prosecuted and 3. when the girl who went through the windscreen arrives at the mortuary.
MY THOUGHTS First of all I may have missed some parts in that play because I had to leave the room. About 10 minutes in I was feeling so sick I was quite literally about to throw up (you can feel it you know what I mean) (btw I didn't) so I had to sit in the bathroom and then go walk up and down the hall a few times. So after about another 10 minutes had passed I finally reenter the stands to discover that the play is still going and is just as graphic as before. Note that this whole time the Careflight guy was commentating on the acts of the actors. I had to block my ears while they described cutting her out of the car lifting her onto a spine board and then removing her from the board all while she was screaming in agony. The camera was still zooming in on all of her injuries many of which were not visible while she was in the car. I thought that it was so incredibly graphic that there is a 100% chance that if I knew what it was going to be earlier I wouldn't have come to the event. I thought that I had seen gore (admittedly this sounds childish) but I only just rewatched the entire Deadpool series as well as the new one. That was about my limit but given how violent they were I thought I would've been fine. I can't believe that I was one of the only people in my bay to get sick watching that.
Lunch doesn't deserve its own part. wheelchair basketball was set up but the line was huge so I didn't bother. As i said before the foyer was packed to the brim and food was both overpriced and the queues were enormous.
SECOND PART After Lunch was over the interviews began. I'll try not to tell the stories so it's less spoilers. I was almost crying in all of these btw. The first interview was about how this woman's friend died and she was left with brain injuries in a car crash. She was crying when she got to the part about her friend dying... The second guy was more physically affected by his car crash, and his story was a little less sad but was still incredibly intense. I believe the second to last person was the speaker in the wheelchair. She had lost control of her entire lower body after the crash and barely survived. The person who t-boned her showed no remorse and attempted a hit-and-run (he was high (because of course he was)). Now the one I really wanted to talk about was the last speaker. (IMO) Her speech was structured very cleverly as she set up the people involved in the crash and got us invested in her son by telling a heartwarming story about the day before the crash involving him.Then she tells us about what happened in the crash. A car smashed into four people on the side of a highway. Then she tells us her son was the one driving she kept saying lines like 'im not here for your sympathy, my son was entirely at fault. He killed four innocent people and orphaned a small girl'. This one was the closest I came to crying during the second half it was soooo sad... It turns out he was high and drunk and he killed those people and died in the crash. Then the presenter got up a video of the funeral where his younger sister was crying as she spoke, and an image of herself (the speaker) with red eyes having been crying a lot...
TL;DR I don't know if I was too empathetic and naive but that event is firmly on my list of "wouldn't've done it if I'd known going in" because I almost threw up and almost started crying. That stuff was so scary I don't know if I even want my licence anymore...
Tell me about your experience with this event. Was it different when you did it? How did you react to the speeches? Do you feel like it achieved the things it set out to do?
Personally the live demo at the start kinda felt like bore especially when they were trynna get the girl out of the car. but lunch was lowkey goated coz me and mates just walked around the whole stadium and tried rizzing up rando girls especially those sitting in groups (failed most of the times) but that was so funny