How Many People Had To Die Before They Invented The Yellow Light?
I used to live very close to the 35W bridge which collapsed. This was annoying, because all the traffic was rerouted right in front of my apartment, meaning loud noises and near-collisions with cars basically all the time. People in cars don't seem to like to look for pedestrians or bikers. I'll admit watching the road while driving is a pretty big inconvenience, but so is picking someones scalp off your windshield. Most of the redirected cars are not used to having to look for people because they normally would be driving on the highway, so things like stop signs and bike riders are ignored. Every day I thought I was going to die on that intersection where the highway met my street. Literally not a day passed where there wasn't some near-miss from some old lady or some turd in a giant car. I hate giant cars. They're very large. At the speed that most people "stop" at stop signs, those cars could kill a human and vaporise a small animal. Typically, the people who buy big cars are also the ones who are less likely to look out for pedestrians. Most of the people who can afford such monstrosities live in the suburbs, where walking is not only unfashionable but impossible; there are no sidewalks, which baffles me to no end, and everyone is so far away from anything except houses that similar to theirs that driving becomes their only mode of doing anything. They forget that some people actually walk places, and anyone using other means of transportation are an inconvenience to them and are regarded as very inconsiderate for wishing to share the road.
After the bridge collapse, there's been a mad scramble to build a new one. I suspected they wanted to get it finished before the Republican National Convention which was hosted in St. Paul, my hometown, so that John McCain could stand in front of it and lie about how our country is actually not falling apart. The fucknuts came and left before the thing was done, but they're still going to make somewhere in the neighborhood of $20,000 for every day ahead of schedule they finish by. The project was pretty huge: There were loud noises and people in orange jackets all over my neighborhood, and they brought in a simply gigantic crane for constructing. This crane was massive. I'm talking big-ass crazy crane the size of something Superman would fight. The bridge is now almost complete. I worry about using something so rushed.
Other bridges all over the city are being renovated, because, hey, apparently you have to do that in order to keep them from falling down. Funny how we're just getting to it now; I feel like this is a trend in America. If a bridge collapses, we rush like crazy to build the new one and make sure it never happens again. But would we try to make sure it didn't happen in the first place? Someone always has to die in order for something to be looked into. Any drug or food recall, any unsafe substance or building threatening lives, none of it is dangerous enough to deal with until someone actually gets killed; suddenly, it's the most important thing. Think Bush would be visiting New Orleans (or, more precisely, Texas) to help with hurricane relief if he hadn't fucked up so publicly with Katrina? Of course not. The press associated with the disaster is more important than the devastation. The 35 W bridge is a sad example of the neglect this country has been receiving from our government thanks to this unjust war, petty squabbles over stem-cells and gay marriage, and plain-and-simple incompetence. I'm fucking tired of it.
For a while I thought I was without a doubt going to be killed by getting run over by a bus. I'm much more optimistic these days; instead, I just think I'm going to be badly injured by a car. I've already been hit by a car on my bike, the same way this shit always almost-happens: As I'm making my way down the sidewalk on a one-way street, a car attempts to turn off the highway, looking only for cars coming from the other direction, ignoring any pedestrians or bikers that might be going the opposite way on the sidewalk. This particular event has happened so frequently that I'm surprised I've only been hit once. Another situation I always get is cars trying to turn as I'm trying to walk through the crosswalk. They turn, assuming of course that you'll no longer be in their way by the time you get across the street. It winds up being like running into someone in a hallway, awkwardly dancing back and forth, unsure if you should go and let the other person past or if their trying to do the same for you. Only this time the other person weighs about 5000 pounds, has bumper stickers all over their ass and is made of metal. There's no winning in a awkward face-off with a car. They are very big. The best I can hope to do is take off their mirror or bend a windshield wiper as I go down, screaming and clenching my exposed bone.
In short: Boo cars! Boo!
After the bridge collapse, there's been a mad scramble to build a new one. I suspected they wanted to get it finished before the Republican National Convention which was hosted in St. Paul, my hometown, so that John McCain could stand in front of it and lie about how our country is actually not falling apart. The fucknuts came and left before the thing was done, but they're still going to make somewhere in the neighborhood of $20,000 for every day ahead of schedule they finish by. The project was pretty huge: There were loud noises and people in orange jackets all over my neighborhood, and they brought in a simply gigantic crane for constructing. This crane was massive. I'm talking big-ass crazy crane the size of something Superman would fight. The bridge is now almost complete. I worry about using something so rushed.
Other bridges all over the city are being renovated, because, hey, apparently you have to do that in order to keep them from falling down. Funny how we're just getting to it now; I feel like this is a trend in America. If a bridge collapses, we rush like crazy to build the new one and make sure it never happens again. But would we try to make sure it didn't happen in the first place? Someone always has to die in order for something to be looked into. Any drug or food recall, any unsafe substance or building threatening lives, none of it is dangerous enough to deal with until someone actually gets killed; suddenly, it's the most important thing. Think Bush would be visiting New Orleans (or, more precisely, Texas) to help with hurricane relief if he hadn't fucked up so publicly with Katrina? Of course not. The press associated with the disaster is more important than the devastation. The 35 W bridge is a sad example of the neglect this country has been receiving from our government thanks to this unjust war, petty squabbles over stem-cells and gay marriage, and plain-and-simple incompetence. I'm fucking tired of it.
For a while I thought I was without a doubt going to be killed by getting run over by a bus. I'm much more optimistic these days; instead, I just think I'm going to be badly injured by a car. I've already been hit by a car on my bike, the same way this shit always almost-happens: As I'm making my way down the sidewalk on a one-way street, a car attempts to turn off the highway, looking only for cars coming from the other direction, ignoring any pedestrians or bikers that might be going the opposite way on the sidewalk. This particular event has happened so frequently that I'm surprised I've only been hit once. Another situation I always get is cars trying to turn as I'm trying to walk through the crosswalk. They turn, assuming of course that you'll no longer be in their way by the time you get across the street. It winds up being like running into someone in a hallway, awkwardly dancing back and forth, unsure if you should go and let the other person past or if their trying to do the same for you. Only this time the other person weighs about 5000 pounds, has bumper stickers all over their ass and is made of metal. There's no winning in a awkward face-off with a car. They are very big. The best I can hope to do is take off their mirror or bend a windshield wiper as I go down, screaming and clenching my exposed bone.
In short: Boo cars! Boo!
posted by MC Harv at 11:39 AM
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