Thursday, November 5, 2009

Happy Guy Fawkes Day!

Well, the inevitable happened today... for the most part I didn't see anything worth writing about today. Sure I saw an ice cream truck pulled over with a blown out tire and the driver standing outside explaining something to a cop but otherwise it was fairly quiet. This is the same ice cream truck that drives down our street at 40 MPH... no wonder he blew out his tires.

Thankfully, there are a couple of things that I've seen over the last several weeks that wouldn't necessarily fit into the days that I saw them either because I got verbose or because I forgot that I saw them... So, here's some stuff I left out:

The first day I started doing this I was driving home through a neighborhood and saw an old lady walking towards me. She looked me in the face and mouthed "slow down". I looked at the speedometer and saw that I was going 30 in a 25 so not excessively fast. The reason this stuck out to me is that I've done the exact same thing while walking around our neighborhood at night. We tend to have a lot of teenagers driving around in the neighborhood and they drive what seems to be really fast. I've been out with the dog or the kids and yelled at them to slow down; I've even contemplated throwing a bag of dog poop that I happen to be carrying at the cars.

However, seeing this lady yell at me made me stop and think. 1) I'm just as guilty. I was speeding in her neighborhood, not by much but speeding nonetheless. 2) It's really a matter of perspective. To someone walking 30 is really fast; to the driver it's frustratingly slow. This caused me to thing about the other things in my life that are colored by perspective. Everything that I see that goes on in the news or in my interaction with others is colored by my upbringing, preconceived notions and general worldview which results in me judging others for things that I am just as guilty of in other contexts and that are really not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things.

The second thing happened just this past Sunday. If you read the post for the weekend I wrote about the fog on Sunday morning while driving to church. On that same drive I pulled up to a stop light at 7:10 in the morning. There were no cars coming from either direction and there were none behind or in front of me. My light was red and stayed red for probably 30-45 seconds and I waited the whole time. Why? It was not unsafe for me to go at that point, there was no camera on the light and no police in sight to enforce the law so why didn't I go? Why wouldn't most people go?

So I started comparing the way that we drive here in America with the way that people drive in other parts of the world. I think that by and large we think that we're unique and rebellious and all march to the beat of our own drums. But, if you compare something as simple as driving, we're complete rules followers. If you've ever been to another country, especially a second or third world country you will know that the rules of the road are really more guidelines than anything else. People run red lights in situations like the above and do not pay attention to lane markers or turn lanes or turn signals or anything of the sort. Here however, everyone maintains their lane and conforms to the rules of the road.

Granted, this makes travel much safer and more pleasant here and having to sit at a light for a minute is worth the cost of the improved conditions. But have we taken the conformity and rules following too far? Are we so conformed to the world that we just stay in our lane, interacting with our people and follow all the "rules" that have been set up arbitrarily? I know I tend to follow all the social rules when I'm with people outside my circle of friends. We talk about safe topics and laugh at all the jokes and don't get too deep into our lives because that's messy and we all like to live on four lane divided highways with overpasses so we don't have to stop and see anything.

I think it's time we all started breaking a few rules and seeing what it would do to the world. Maybe we should drift out of our lanes or drive 4 wide on a two lane country road. We should stop waiting around for the "green light" in our friends and neighbors lives and should instead just invade their lives and decide the you are going to screw the rules and be real. That would be awesome!!!

Hopefully I'll be back with some new stuff tomorrow... we'll see! Later...