Life is so short, we must move very slowly.
—aThai saying (also attributed to the Talmud)
Three car pile-up at the junction of Stuart Highway and Woolner this afternoon…a massive wreckage, one person dead. Traffic jams spread out from the epicentre like spider arms…people were sitting in their cars for probably 30-45 minutes (though to hear them talk about it, you’d think they’d been stuck for four hours).
Lots of customers arrived just before closing time to Jacksons, complaining about how long they’d sat in traffic. Amazing. Three-quarters of an hour and someone horribly dead, and they were whining about the traffic.
No point sitting in that, I told Sharon as we locked the shop, and suggested a few beers at the Railway Club. At 7:20 we left, and I cycled my usual route home: crossing the Stuart Highway at Woolner. Emerging upon the Highway I found it deserted…like a scene from a movie about the apocalypse…they’d sealed Stuart Highway off from Parap lights to Ross Smith, and the streetlights were out. I crossed the empty 6-lane highway, staying well away from the dozens of police and emergency vehicles, the cranes and other trucks, and the circle of blazing halogen lights that surrounded the crash scene.
It all looked so desolate and empty. I thought “what a dreadful place to step off the world; what a last thing of this life to see before it all rushes away from you, and the darkness floods in.”
I also thought “Car drivers are mental.” They are so careless and complacent on the road…road rules are viewed as unpleasant restrictions that the government makes up to ‘cramp one’s style’ and ‘spoil one’s fun’, instead of as safety measures to save lives and prevent tragedies. Often, if they think they can get away with breaking a rule, they will. Like petulant children. They can be arrogant…they think that because they are in their coccoons of steel, and because their seats are so soft and comfortable and curve around their bodies, that they are somehow invincible. Also, they will gleefully break a rule that could result in killing someone else…snuffing out another person’s life, shattering that person’s family and friends, creating this huge expanding cloud of loss and grief, because they couldn’t bear the thought of sitting for 5 fucking minutes at a red light, and had to go straight through it.
I don’t drive because I hate the very idea of cars, what they stand for, what humans have become because of them. There’s laziness, and often there’s bad health and corpulence; there’s the demand for fossil fuel at any cost to the planet, the consumption of resources, the idea of being wrapped in a mass-produced bubble and cut off from the world around you, the noise, the way the air smells at rush hour, the irrational impatience and constant need to be rushing somewhere (you think a car saves time? How much television do people watch? Don’t try to tell me that folks value their time if they can spare any for television…) the selfishness of drivers who believe that being in a metal box moving with great force is an instrument of power instead of a great responsibility. It’s like walking around in public, casually swinging a gun around…you should have to pass seriously strict psychological and IQ tests before you are allowed to have either.