Running through Red Lights/down Pedestrians

this morning, nearly got hit by a car. I was crossing the street on the walk signal (which by the way, now has to be depicted for me in the form of a pictogram and not the word - to which some people would say is in response to people not speaking English, but to which others likeminded as I would say is because we Americans are becoming entirely too stupid to read . . . in ANY language) . . .

but I digress.

As I was thinking this, I was nearly plowed down by a car, which was running the red light. I instinctively yelled something such as, "My good person, you should be more careful how you manage your driving!" (only my exact words were not nearly so polite!)

and as the car sped off, oblivious to my discomfort, I started to think that to run a red light and nearly kill a person shows utter and total disregard for other individual human lives. As I walked further on my way I began to ponder what real regard do we, as a society, have these days for other human lives? This society, which is one in which, as I was growing up, one man shot another to death over a Pac-Man game - and a mere 20 years later a 13 year old boy plows down five students and a teacher over a declining of a simply (and probably irrelevant) date - and I could go on but I had to stop myself and think back and imagine past times, and I thought

that perhaps in the past, the distant past, they really did consider human life to be more valuable than ours today. Oh sure, the Europeans tended to burn people at the stake for being Jewish and the Aztecs had blood sacrifices of the losing teams at simple games - but when you take into consideration that in many cultures the number of people you had was directly related to the amount of food you could make for the existing society, and to decrease the number of people would decrease the possibility for food from the hunt or growth from the land, then it all becomes more serious - who you kill or expel.

Because each person had an intrinsic value to the community at large.

What intrisic value are we teaching our society now? I walk past two people on the street and I wonder what some psychopath thinks - so what if I kill these two people? Who cares? What does it hold

for

ME?

And that's the problem isn't it? We, as a society, do not see ANY value in other human life because it has NO direct relation to ourselves. That's why it's so easy to make the leap from mere apathy to open misanthropy.

So, yes, I'm going to make the leap in logic - that woman who nearly barrelled me over with her car is just as savage as the guy on the belltower with the rifle, picking us off one by one. Because we have lost the sense that we NEED each other to get through this thing we call LIFE. And that made me terribly sad, and as I was thinking this, that was when I started wishing that the library would serve me a beer.

But the library doesn't serve beer.

But the front desk attendant told me where the nearest bar was. So I checked out some books and read them at a quiet table with a new Dos Equis coming to me about every 15 minutes until the afternoon had come and gone.

Then, everything had been put back into its properly dulled and mellow perspective.

VG