11.30.13

"Thinking themselves wise, they became fools..."  Romans1,22

No one is surprised by an occasional rolling or "California stop."

Or going through yellow lights- they mean speed up, right?

But a new day and driver is emerging- the "I don't stop at anything" driver.

Perhaps this is partly why folks are driving less these days.

In the last year or so it's as if there is some sort of competition, with prizes for those who stop the least. These drivers are legion and multiplying.

For example, there is the Southington Connecticut Library cut-through artist. He will not wait at the Route 10/Meriden Road Intersection/ Walter D School intersection, but prefers instead to negotiate the S turns through the Library parking lot at the rear pedestrian entrance.

What a time saver! But then he meets up with the auto book return folks who won't get out the car, doing u-turns.

Then there is the going west on Waterbury Road in Cheshire guy, who routinely goes into the east bound lane of the intersection to get around us commoners waiting at the red light at Marion Road.

So clever that guy, flooring it up the hill as our gas prices rise.

This no stopping game isn't just for the testosterone and attention deficit addled. It appears to have even seized some of the women that everyone likes in no less a place than bucolic Burlington, Vermont.

For example, an apparently sensible late model Honda (northbound) occupant suddenly turns left off Pine Street into the Cumberland Farms Gas Station, zippy zippy around the pumps and a large commercial vehicle now hiding her Honda from us patrons, but what matters is anbody or anything else but that she's now westbound on Lakeside Ave.

No stopping at the new bagel place intersection for her. (No bagel for her!)

This happens even in the one suburban seeming town in Vermont (it's really a city we're told), South Burlington, at the Swift and Spear red light when a similarly and otherwise apprently sensible commuter, westbound on Swift, suddenly unstoppable goes off road right onto the Episcopalian front lawn.

And yet and still this inveterate commuter has the passing pluck to make kind eyes that say "Yes this is truly flatlander behavior, but I'm still sinless."

It used to be when folks got injured and property was destroyed and someone was temporarily unreasonable we could say it was an "accident."

But now we have a new breed of driver and s/he is ushering a post neglience standard: we do whatever we want all the time, while expecting everyone else to act perfectly reasonable for our benefit.

How charitable is that?

Back to Cumberland Farms, I wanted to have a nice chat with the Honda occupant, but she left too soon.

I wanted to ask if she had ever read the literary art form known as the "tort allegation," which uses many expansive and descriptive words and clauses and then concludes with a bold, stark- and soon to be executed claim- on all one's assets. 

It's truly a new day when such ubiquitous and "wise" folks are not stopping for anything or anyone, because as we know by now, it's all about them anyway. 

How could it have taken us so long to realize?

(As I finish this I also now realize that this sounds like our nation's foreign policy of late. I assure you this was not my purpose in writing and is merely incidental, or part of the cosmic zeitgeist, or limited to four random commuters, or something, and besides, whoever heard of one's culture effecting a nation's politics?)