People wonder about the decay of civilization. The term civilization is used at the extreme abstract. Civilizations create culture. They don't consume it.
Complaining and complaining. Let's get more police. Let's make even more laws. Let's build bigger prisons. Make people obey the law and make more laws to say so.
People complain of murder, assault, rape, and theft as the leading decay factor to a nation. I say no.
You know where the failure stems from? It begins at the street corner. How many of those same righteous cross with only moments to the yellow caution light come on.
Toronto installed countdowns on the walk lights. Most lights are 12 seconds countdown to yellow. Fewer seconds in the poor people's districts as their lives mean less to the proper function of a city. Two seconds means only one thing. Run across faster.
Go through the university campus. It matters little which one. Ryerson, Alberta, Manitoba, Toronto, Lakehead, or York, you can pick any. Future society leaders, lawyers, teachers, politicians et al run across against the lights. They jay walk without looking for traffic.
It begins earlier. Stand in downtown Toronto watching people dragging kids across on lights or pushing toddlers out off the curb into traffic against a light. You know the same toddler of the same mother who says that the school can only have peanut free lunches because the little gene fart might, might have a peanut allergy. These are the same people that panic about SARS yet dive into a street in the company with two ton metal monsters driven by people with the same time management problems.
Pedestrians can only cross when the little white hand shows. The majority of people crossing at a light will cross on a red hand or the do not walk signal. Police fail to enforce this little crime but insist that more police are needed. While a murder is a crime against humanity, crossing on a 'do not walk' is a crime against all society. It states something about the person and social responsibility.
1 comment:
I have to admit, prior to living in Toronto I had never observed so many human beings so late for their own funerals and so determined to arrive at those funerals before they toppled over for their final, exhausted collapse into a grave. I guess, when you've got a date with a grave and you're running late, you tend to cut a lot of corners and willfully disobey a lot of traffic lights.
My personal pet peeve in Toronto was all the people who ran wildly up the up-escalators, down the down-escalators, down the up-escalators and up the down-escalators, with no regard whatsoever for all the many thousands of country bumpkins who visit the city each day. I've seen a lot of bumpkins trampled in my time and those aren't very pleasant memories.
On a related topic, I was also highly amused by the vast majority of Torontonians who seemed to think, if they missed an elevator by failing to get their hands, feet or heads in the way in time to block the elevator doors from closing, no elevator would ever return, for all eternity, to give them a gentle ride up into the stratosphere. From inside the elevators, madly pressing the 'Close' button, I used to see their grief-stricken faces as they were left behind for all eternity on the ground floor or even, horror of horrors, in some basement or sub-basement.
Strangely enough, people who don't live in Toronto don't seem to be in all that much of a hurry to get to their graves. Yokels!
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