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A trucker this week was sent to jail…
I don’t move in millionaire circles, but I wish I had thanked an old philanthropist. Have you seen those antique cars at Heritage Park? The nice man who donated them was driving his antique car when a trucker, according to police, would have had him in sight for 14 seconds. Long-g-g seconds. But the trucker, feeling entitled to be on his cell phone, rear ended the older, slower driver, and killed him.
I have seen entitlements down the years, for example producers of “second hand smoke,” and users of cellular telephones in public, who expressed their angry feelings of entitlement. I’m still laughing at the time on the commuter train when everyone in my car could hear the man over in the next car on his phone. People were frowning. So I pulled out my imaginary telephone and started answering him, at his own volume. Other riders cracked up.
In time, as good, quieter people found courage with each other, things changed for substances and cell phones.
Years ago, newspapers reported that waiters, with backup from the good public, would tell elegant diners to carry their cells over to the pay-phones to conduct their phone conversations. I didn’t do fine dinning, so I never saw it for myself, but I would have loved to see a poor but honest waiter facing down a filthy rich loudmouth.
Every time a new technology comes along society has to play catch up. Back when I was a boy, after the scientists had invented the horror of the atom bomb, it was said that laboratory wizards would have a responsibility to think before they give us any new inventions. Not now. I read nothing about such ethics when a scientist in Asia published how to predetermine a baby’s sex. Still, it seems to me inventors of new technologies have a duty to think things through, as Prometheus did, before they gift us with their fire. (Sting sang, in Russians, “How can I save my little boy, from Oppenheimer’s deadly toy?”)
Obviously in Silicon Valley the computer scientists, who carry their calculators and phones in cases on their belt, so charmingly nerdish, were oblivious when they changed 9-1-1 to a single button—didn’t they think it through? Some folks will feel entitled to just toss their cell phone tumbling into their purse, or jam it in their jackets and jeans, and then sit on the phone—needing only that single button to rouse the guys at the fire station. Too bad the nerds forgot their duty of common sense.
History repeats: I watched as it was like pulling teeth to get entitled jerks to admit that “distracted driving” is a Bad Thing. Early on, Oprah even had a man on her TV show who explained that even “hands free” phones are much more dangerous that talking to a front seat passenger. But still people kept angrily rejecting the science. If not for the resistance from those “folks of entitlement,” new laws could have been passed right away; saving God knows how many limbs and innocent lives.
Meanwhile, in my hometown of Calgary the road engineers hadn’t anticipated how the population would boom. Pity the drivers: At certain stoplights, with our lack of East-West connecting roads, it is now common to see a number of idling cars. After the “distracted driving” law was finally passed, the police then posed as beggars, going among the stopped cars and ticketing the jerks using mobile devices. Oh, how the drivers complained! Despite the law, the idiots felt entitled, since they were “stopped.” I have no sympathy.
I remember being dead still once on Memorial Drive. With a dozen cars ahead of me, and a score stopped behind me, I felt safe. No one could possibly come roaring down the road and hit me. The light changed. I gently took my foot off the brake, patiently waiting as the cars ahead, one by one, pulled away. Unfortunately I was chewing sour candy that day, with my jaw way out of line, when—Crash! We both got out. My car had only the tiniest dent. “What happened?” I asked
“I was on my cell phone—my hands free cell phone; I just broke off with my girl friend—suddenly I noticed the light had changed, so I went.” That was in April. In July my dentist, standing at arm’s length, could hear my jaw clicking. Later I had to cut short a road trip to get checked out for intense pain—in case maybe I had a raging tooth infection. Physiotherapy is not an option. Now I permanently feel a difference in the two sides of my face, a reminder for the rest of my life,… Oh well, maybe my accident has sent that man a lesson, preventing a fatal injury to someone else.
Now, I don’t want to spoil anyone’s fun; I like new bombs and technology as much as anybody; in fact, I’m too often using my MacBook Air to surf. Just last week I noticed someone had posted a nice clip from Easy Rider of friends on motorcycles riding through God’s own country. One of the commenters for that post used to love riding free and easy too. Not now. In the last seconds of his normal life he could see the lady who hit him holding her goddamn cell phone. Now he has a new normal. A wheelchair.
Today I’m a mellow, middle aged man of good will… with scathing contempt for persons of entitlement.
…
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Sean Crawford
February
Calgary
2013
~Footnote for US readers: Somebody told me that in crowded Los Angeles the cars all have to start to move off in unison, but not here in “Cowtown.”
