Life is not a James Bond movie. If it were, there would be the ever resourceful secret agent saving the day. And the victims. In real life, victims die, or linger in hospitals for weeks, before coming back to a dreadful reality: that they lost a friend or a loved one. A license to kill doesn’t have to do with guns necessarily. Put a knife in the hand of an incompetent, or drunkard surgeon, and there you have it. Put a builder’s permit in the hands of a person who doesn’t know their right from left, and there you have it. Put a driver’s license in the hands of a man who’s a speeding maniac, and there you have it. A logical question would be: who’s crazy enough to do this? Who’s irresponsible enough to allow it? Who’s insane enough to facilitate it? Nobody. Reformulating: who’s corrupt enough to do it? Give or take 3 police departments from 3 major cities in Romania. The results of the driver’s license giving spree? Police employees of small degree already own a villa and a BMW, a parish priest acting as a recruiter of eligible (read generous) candidates lives a not so humble and God fearing life, and many, many happy drivers. How many? First estimates say 2,000. The business went on smoothly, pay anywhere between 1,000 and 4,000 dollars and obtain the driver’s license for as many categories as you want in just one day. Wanna be a Sunday driver, or a truck driver? Come up with the cash and your dream comes true. Never mind you’re barely able to read and write, colour blind, or with serious mental issues that make you think pedestrians at zebra crosses are there just like the bowls in a bowling game. Five months after the lucrative driver’s license business began, many of the beneficiaries have already killed or put into hospital a lot of people. Now we stop and wonder. How could this be? Who would do that? The sad answer is that many of us. Shakespeare wrote “Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Four hundred years after the ink dried on his manuscript, these words have a prophetic meaning. We all have dreams, ideals, wants, needs. Sometimes we achieve them, sometimes we can’t afford them. When I WANT becomes stronger than I’M NOT ALLOWED, when the desire for an object overrides the objections of the common sense and morality, tragedies are bound to happen. Bribe money act like an anesthetic on people’s conscience. And they issue licenses to kill, as surely as if they were putting guns in the hands of the bribe giver. I happened to witness a car accident, caused by one of these drivers who most certainly did not belong at the steering wheel. After killing a family of three, the young Gucci-and-Prada-dressed nineteen-something girl pulled out a mobile phone and most certainly called daddy. Her first words were not of fear or guilt, but simply: “I’m in a bit of a mess here, can you send someone to pick me up?” Betcha’ she thought there must be someone she could bribe to fix things.