Blasted by the Light

About half a mile from my house, I come to the light where the exit from my ghetto subdivision intersects a major cross-street. If the light is green, I go. If the light is red, I stop. If the light is yellow, I probably speed up like mad, hoping to squeak through, but that doesn’t happen often. With a perverse will of its own, it deliberately chooses to turn red according to what causes the most aggravation. Basically, it turns red when it sees me coming.

The response produces a pattern of behavior that amuses it, and so it continues to perform adversely. The light is green. The light waits. I approach the intersection. The light turns yellow. There is still hope. I accelerate. At the last possible point for any rational potential to legally enter the intersection, the light turns red. It then pauses in derision, all traffic from all directions momentarily suspended to contemplate the indignity of my defeat while it savours the grandeur of victory and the affirmation of power. All the civilized world pauses and ha-has my reluctance to collide with cross traffic and incur the willingness of law enforcement to commit acts of imposition on my personal freedom.

The tyranny of this traffic light has a statistical kind of validity. I have had numerous opportunities to sit and observe the complete cycle. 90 seconds for the traffic on the main street. 20 seconds for the left turn out of the through street from the other direction, and 10 seconds for exit from my subdivision. Out of the 120-second cycle, 10 seconds barely represents 8%. From a strictly empirical quantitative view on the subdivision side of the light, the light remains red 92% of the time, perhaps even a little more, depending on how the intervening yellow plays out, but does that mean I should miss the green cycle by less than a second 100% of the time? I don’t think so. There is an adverse power of the universe at work here.

Despite the evil nature of this particular traffic light, however, like Republicans, it serves a social function for which I must grudgingly acknowledge some gratitude. Without the traffic light, I might never leave my subdivision at all. During the last hurricane, for instance, a somewhat bemused law enforcement officer described stopping a driver going seventy miles an hour along the main road through intersections at which the lights were out.

Technically such intersections should be considered four-way stops, yet even in emergencies, the momentum of the major thoroughfare seems to overwhelm the public interest in caution. The force of the flow sweeps aside the interesests of the intersecting side streets, and the need for more obvious enforcement of the conventions becomes apparent. Unchecked, the path most traveled becomes the path of intimidation, and the bullies prevail.

But in a Democracy, even bullies proceed along paths prepared for them by the operation of social contract, a complete system of agreement and controls. There would be no seventy-mile-an-hour violations through native sand-pine wilderness and swamp. Only the existence of multiple lanes of pavement enables such carefree excess. In fact, anyone who stops at a stoplight, anyone who uses a public road, anyone who goes where they want and does what they want benefits from an agreement to join together in public interest, a social contract. Anyone who uses a public road is a socialist. Anyone who uses a public road takes a handout.

You can make whatever arguments you want about free enterprise and individual responsibility. Those are good things to the extent that they encourage self-actualization and constructive activity, but as recent economic failures have finally made painfully apparent, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, and J.K. Rowling can only accumulate vast wealth because the economic storms are controlled by complex systems of communication and transportation in which their products can flourish. In a Democratic society, without universal participation, they are nothing, and the readiness of rough men to commit violent acts on their behalf that serves as law enforcement in the global economy, while necessary, is overrated.

For whatever reasons, there are people in the world, and Sadam Hussein was one of them, who understand only violence, but do we want traffic lights with attitudes? The readiness and willingness to commit acts of violence is vastly different from the commission of violent acts willy-nilly. Like the light at my intersection, the operation of violence takes on a perverse attitude of its own, like a traffic light that operates entirely at random, or not at all. Indiscriminate violence, or even worse, poorly considered violence, therefore defeats its own purpose.