Walk this way

I'll all for pedestrian power. The wider the sidewalks and the more "no turn on red" signs there are, the happier I am. I can trade stories with fellow peds of almost getting wiped out by cars taking a corner way too fast (I know where I will die: corner of New Hampshire and M), and I can mentally declare war on the people who come to stop signs too fast and look for all the world like they're going to buzz straight through it. It's times like these when I start fantasizing about becoming a pedestrian vigilante, walking around with a baseball bat to smash out the windshields of the drivers on the cell phones who almost pancake some poor ped.

It seems unfair in a way...drivers are just trying to get somewhere, like anyone else, but the problem is that the driver/pedestrian relationship is unequal. In a collision between the two, one of the people is going to end up dead or mangled and the other person will—at worst—end up feeling really, really guilty. Fantasies and rationalities aside, my default sympathies are with the walkers, and the drivers are guilty until proven innocent.

But as with so many things—politics, music choice, city vs. suburbs, age—just when you (read: I) start to feel divisive and prejudicial, it only take a cursory look around at your own kind to realize that idiocy knows no boundaries. You'd think that at this point in evolution, people would have been learned the instinct to not walk directly in front of a moving car, but apparently evolution still has some work to do. It seems that it's still news to people that crosswalk lights are not a scheme by The Man to Keep You Down, but a method of organization that keeps people from being...what's the word I'm looking for here...oh, right: KILLED!

So I'm here today to apologize to drivers for my blanket prejudices as well as to call for schools to begin the much-needed teaching of the physics of a collision between a moving car and the human body. They can demonstrate the effects on teenage suburbanite Republican metal heads.