Share the road?
You’re driving along. You occupy an unyielding metal vehicle weighing a ton, more or less. You overtake a bicycle rider. You have a stripe of paint on the road to your left. You have a human being riding a bicycle on your right.
What kind of mind can’t decide which of these should be accorded the greater degree of inviolability? Whatever type it is, we seem to have lots of them among us. “I can’t cross that paint stripe! It’s a double yellow! I’ll just grit my teeth and take a chance with that human life over there!”
You’d think people could figure this out a little better, yet time after time this odd pattern evidences itself. Not only do we get obscure glimpses into the minds of single individuals this way, we also see how humanity tend to act when in “herd mode.” On the positive side, when one person in a line of traffic swings wide to give the bicyclist some room, the rest tend to follow along. This vice works versa, however, since the opposite pattern is just as likely to appear. One person deciding to “play chicken” with the bicycle rider will lead a string of drivers to engage in similar behavior. Apparently, we are only about as good as the people around us.
Tags: Rants
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I just got back from
Well, it’s my birthday, too, yeah.
The translation here, 21st century style, is, “I know I did something to inconvenience you, but I don’t really want to have an unpleasant exchange with you, and I certainly don’t want to change my behavior in any way, either, so I am saying this meaningless thing I learned in elementary school so you’ll go away and not say anything unpleasant to me to try to get me to actually take responsibility for my actions.”
Speaking of that whole keep-up-with-the-traffic thing, one situation really screams out for it. Think of the last time you found yourself at the end of a long line of cars at a stop light. Didn’t you wish everybody would just go when the light turned green–I mean, hurry, even? Typically, the drivers at the front know they have a pretty good chance of getting through the light, so they don’t have any urgency about it. But how about the guys at the back? Wouldn’t it be karmicly appropriate for the ones at the front to think of the poor schlubs at the back? Well, of course it would.
There is something that approximately one in five of you could do for the rest of us, something that seems quite easy, and why wouldn’t you want to do something easy that helped many other people? It really would entail no downside for you at all. It’s simply a matter of keeping up with traffic, if you could please. Or getting out of the way. Thanks so much.
Tonight’s
Having plumbed a new low in North Carolina politics–and, let’s face it, a low in NC, the home of Jesse Helms, is by default, a national low–Elizabeth Dole has managed to lose her senate seat, perhaps primarily by accusing her opponent, Kay Hagan, of being (gasp) an atheist.