Today while driving down Touhy, in no rush to get to the Edens expressway, I nearly killed a young woman. I almost wrote “girl” but the person in question occupied the nebulous space between child/adult where one is never quite comfortable calling them “man” or “woman,” at least not without the qualifying “young” preceding.
Forgive the semantic quibbling. Start again, less charitably.
Today while driving down Touhy, in no rush to get to the Edens expressway, I nearly killed a stupid person. Well… that’s not fair. One may act stupidly in the moment, but should that one stupid act blanket their entire existence to the extent that stupid is used not as an adjective but a noun?
This is all my attempt at mitigating my terrible instinct to judge, to get riled, pissed, superior, indignant, to make sweeping claims I can’t defend but nevertheless feel. Feelings, as we in the humanities state repeatedly, don’t make an argument, but fuck it. This is a blog post, not an ENG 102 paper.
Perhaps I should detail the events so that any fears that I nearly committed pre-meditated murder are allayed.
I was driving west on Touhy— a busy street with four lanes of east-west traffic— when a young woman (old enough to know better) decided that she’d sooner run through traffic than wait for a chance to safely jaywalk. And I do mean jaywalk, as there was no crosswalk. Were there one, I’d be at fault for not slowing down and yielding the right of way to the pedestrian. And I might have even done that had she been standing on the curb as I approached, but the young woman in question arrived at Touhy abruptly and simply decided that she wasn’t in the mood to slow down. Or so I assume. What else could have caused a sensible person to think Fuck it and walk into traffic? Consider again those four lanes and you may picture, correctly, two lanes of cars speeding west and two lanes of cars speeding east. Also consider that the speed limit is somewhere in the low 40s, ensuring that we were all doing closer to 45, 50, and— in the case of the guy who passed me minutes before the near murder— 60.
The young woman walked across Touhy while wearing a big, dumb smile. What was behind it? Joyful contempt for the assholes who had to slow down and accommodate her addiction to immediacy? Fear manifesting as nervous laughter? Blissful idiocy?
It’s the smile that’s pissing me off. Brazen disregard for one’s safety and the safety of others is infuriating, sure, but smiling the entire time? Ugh.
(For the record, I have jaywalked a lot in my time. I’m a longtime Chicagoan and have no problem disobeying traffic signals, but I do it when no car could possibly hit me and no driver could possibly have their reflexes tested. There’s an art to safely jaywalking.)
There was no murder. (Note: I should use the words “accident” or “vehicular manslaughter” but murder, even in this scenario being without forethought, seems sufficiently extreme. Forgive the lack of euphemism and let’s just get on with things.) I honked then swerved, not the best order for those actions, but the jaywalker was unharmed. As she passed my lane, barely avoiding impact with my car, she proceeded to the next, causing the vehicle next to me to swerve into my lane long enough to share it with me but, thankfully, not collide. I don’t know what happened to the jaywalker next, but I heard a succession of car horns, so I’ll guess she made it across Touhy with her foolish brains still in her skull and not splattered across the road.
Here’s why this is really upsetting me: It’s December 30th. I have this hope every December that I’ll be better next year. Be a better person. Definitely be a better teacher. Husband. Citizen. I don’t think in terms of resolutions, but a year ending is a good time to take stock and figure out who the fuck you’d like to be as the calendar changes. And this year has seen me fall short of that ideal person. Next year will as well, but I can try, goddamnit, even when the inevitable stupity and annoyance confront me. I can try not to act equally stupid and annoying. I’ll fail again, but such is the way of the human being.
My inclination as I move closer to my mid-50s is to shake my fist at a cloud, proverbially. Which is why, once the adrenaline waned and my heart relaxed, I reached the not-at-all-informed conclusion that this young woman did what she did because of social media and the internet. Of course. Because why wouldn’t a middle-aged man assume that the problem is that these kids today are too blah blah blah what with their yadda yaddas and whateverthefucks.
BUT…
I do believe that the instant access of Amazon Prime, Instagram, and Door Dash has made us— young and old alike— less patient. We expect what we want when we want it. Likely always been the case, but we have faster tools to make that expectation reality. So is it so crazy to assume that someone who is clearly a digital native has a part of her brain ill-wired so they can only feel screaming agony when having to wait a goddamn minute for traffic to clear? Why should she have to? Doesn’t the world always move at the pace of her desires? Click here, get this. Scroll and see. Download dopamine. Get any food imaginable delivered asafuckingp. Didn’t love those tacos? Order sushi. You deserve it. You deserve to have your every fleeting whim catered to, even if that catering leaves you unsatisfied, as will the next in a series of diminishing returns.
Okay, I’ll stop the anti-tech “Get off my lawn!” rant. And though I pretty much agree with a lot of the above, I know that I cannot make the connection between our tech-saturated culture of immediacy and the jaywalker’s jaywalking. And I also acknowledge that we have always been a stupid species given to stupid fulfilling of stupid desires much to our own peril, so I will accept the criticism that I, like many middle-aged and elderly cranks, am unfairly maligning the generations below me. But that hardly means that these tools of immediacy are not stoking our worst fires and causing at least as much harm as good. (Convenience may be the better word, though the conflating of “good” and “convenient” is troubling.)
If the coming year threatens to be a doozy, I can at least try not to let it exacerbate my worst tendencies. I am looking at another fucking Trump presidency, one that could easily be worse than the last considering the lessons Donnie learned from his last time cosplaying politician seem to be not to appoint anyone to his cabinet that will tell him no. Without being in office, the prick has managed to tank another bipartisan bill, the last being on the immigration issue he pretends to give a fuck about and the latest being a resolution to keep the government open. And this recent destroying of what was otherwise a pretty good example of across the aisle compromise was spurred less by his ideals than by his ego, as Elon fucking Musk tweeted against the CR and Trump, not to be outdone, parroted the complaint. The prospect of Trump again in power is disheartening enough, but Musk? Fucking hell, someone save us from the oligarchs already.
And then there’s this fucking kid Luigi who killed a CEO and quickly became a Tiger Beat sweetheart to throngs of “burn it down” nihilists. Gen Z is apparently in favor of an extra-judicial murder, which makes me not any more positive about the looming 2025. (Side note: there are many who have discussed Luigi Mangione’s good looks. I suppose he’s not a bad looking kid. He is certainty in better shape than I am, but damn if his swarthy Mediterranean handsomeness seems damn near banal to a guy who sees what I see every time I step in front of a mirror. It’s a good thing I didn’t kill that jaywalker— I’d be swamped with marriage proposals. Just sayin’.)
While I have no love for the CEO of a health insurance company that maximizes profits at the expense of people’s health, the internet culture of applauding murder is a bummer. Hard to still feel leftist superiority when my team is dabbling in some ugly equivocations. I can’t see a lot of fun “discourse” coming.
My worst tendencies would have me descend deeper into black-hearted cynicism and erupt in anger, but I’m fighting them. I am not a nihilist. That’s too easy. Callow. Fake, really. As a card-carrying absurdist, I will do as always and greet the boulder with a smile before I push it uphill once again. I’ll laugh at the empty universe and sing a song as I strain my muscles, spirit, hope. I’ll try damn hard to not engage in petty arguments. I’ll work harder to not yell at my neighbor for letting her dog off its leash, even when the result was that dog threatening mine. I’ll scold without insult next time. I’ll not assume my worst-performing students are simply lazy or disengaged. I’ll try harder to engage them. I’ll do my best to successfully avoid killing a young person who runs into traffic and not assume that their actions are 100% the result of internet-bred impatience. I’ll not make sweeping generalizations that I know damn well I can’t defend.
I’ll try not to, at least. That’s not nothing, right?