Outlawing Idiocy

Recently some halfwit stepped in front of a bus somewhere in New York City and got creamed like Britney Spears' career when she shaved her head. (Article) I don't care where in New York, or when, or why. With all due respect to most dead, I don't even care who. What matters is that some bonehead, nanny legislator in the NY State Senate has overreacted and wants to outlaw the wearing of headphones while crossing the street. He calls it "iPod Oblivion." This was the CSI conclusion? They found headphones near the ears of the victim, probably still playing some Phil Collins solo effort, and deduced that the mild distraction of rhythmic sounds created such a sense of mind numb oblivion that it overpowered the use of all other senses - LIKE SIGHT - that all the mechanics necessary for personal safety were rendered useless... useless - even though these headphones allow ambient sound to come through, sounds like that of a roaring bus engine or even people shouting, "HEY, DON'T STEP IN FRONT OF THAT BUS, ASSHOLE!"

Now getting flattened by a bus can be serious business. I remember seeing a pigeon get run over by a bus wheel when I was a in the sixth grade. The bus was rolling away slowly from a stop at Public Square in Wilkes-Barre, and the pigeon didn't move out of the way because there were breadcrumbs still before him. It could have been a set up. Nonetheless, it made a popping sound like a cork from a champagne bottle, but it wasn't very cheery. I knew then that I really never wanted to get run over by anything, let alone a city bus.

As for people, I suppose no one wants to spend more city money cleaning blood and bone off of the windshields of the city's mass transit fleet. And without a doubt, killing pedestrians throws the riders' schedules way off. In olden times, they attached cow catchers onto the fronts of locomotives so that the engineers wouldn't have to be bothered with the carcasses of clueless cows. But today, rather than understanding that some people are simply idiots bound to meet the face of oncoming traffic because crossing demands the basic skills set of a 6 year old, the state senator chooses to punish everyone.

Idiocy case-in-point: You've often heard me refer to my old boss, well he always use to leave us with last minute instructions whenever he left the building, and he'd preface his to-do list with the phrase, "In case I get hit by a bus..." He was an idiot, but he was at least charmingly self-aware enough to understand that his chances of stepping in front of the slow moving metro were higher than the rest of ours. (At first we'd say, "How would he get hit by a bus?" But after getting to know him over the years, we saw it as an evolutionary inevitability.) And now no one in the iPod generation can wear headphones while crossing the street. Walk a block listening to Phil Collins, then headphones off your head for crossing the street. Walk the next block listening to Genesis, then headphones off while crossing the street. Not just volume down, but off of your head so that the Police can easily identify you as a law-abider rather than a dirty law-breaker / destroyer of social structure.

I'm a runner. I vowed years ago never to pay for a gym membership, and to this day I never have. I don't like the idea of sitting in someone else's ass sweat on the lat pulldown machine, but there are other reasons, too, like the ridiculously high fees, but I digress. When I run, I listen to music. It gives me a sense of freedom and pleasure which counteracts the merciless destruction of my dreams that is daily life. My running years go back to the original Sony Walkman. I won one the very first year that they came out by getting the most pledges in a swim-a-thon. (How I long for those days when I gave a crap...) It was a cassette player with buttons for Play, Stop, Forward and Reverse. In those days, we listened to whatever song was next, and we liked it. On a longer run, I would just flip the tape over and over. I've carried every incarnation of the Walkman in my left hand on every run ever since. Now, finally, I'm enjoying my first hands free year with the new iPod shuffle/clip.

On my run the other night I wondered what it would be like to be forced by law to take off my headphones at every intersection in honor of the idiots of this world and to spend the rest of my life fearing the police at every crosswalk. I wasn't real pleased with it. For one thing, many of you know that my deepest personal fear is being wrongly accused of something and then thrown in jail an innocent man. No one believes anything I say in the real world, let alone my pleas of injustice with the shadows of prison bars fallen across my face. Worse might be tallying up too many headphone ticket fines and getting thrown in jail. I don't think I'd earn much "respect" from other inmates "on the inside" for that. I'd then have to earn their friendship the hard way, and that's why it's my worst fear.

This, I realize, could be my Nathan Hale moment. They can't outlaw idiocy and make the rest of us live lives in total "safety" devoid of pleasure. Yes, I'm referring to many, many laws here. Adults should be able to enjoy most anything they want in privacy and in public if it doesn't lead to immediate and necessary danger to others and or their children. Incredibly restrictive drug laws are one reason why our prison system is so terribly overcrowded. Politically, I know that no candidate will ever run on an "Increased Personal Pleasure" platform, so it's up to us to draw the nanny-line ourselves. Metaphorically, as long as buses run, people will step in front of them with or without headphones. In Pittsburgh, the bus lanes on Fifth Avenue run against traffic. When I lived there in college, every year a knucklehead or two would step right into the bus lane and be vaporized courtesy of their own cluelessness and a Port Authority bus. Just leaves an open seat for someone else heading to Shadyside.

I learned how to cross the street when I was in the first grade. My Dad used to hold my hand leading me to the school bus stop at the corner of Main and Beaumont Streets. One day, he changed to guiding me with his hand gently on my shoulder blade, then eventually no hand at all, and soon I went on my own. Since then, I've borne the responsibility of not getting hit by oncoming traffic all by myself. So far, so good. But if I did get hit by a bus and lived to hear about it, my old man would have been the first one at my bedside calling me a "Damned Idiot." Whenever any of us did something stupid like getting our bike stolen or falling off the roof of the shed, Dad would call us Damned Idiots and then mutter the same word over and over all afternoon, "Carelessness.... Carelessness..." It was never pleasant, nor very sympathetic, but about that aspect of our behaviour he was never wrong.

We as a society have to understand and accept that some people will get hit by buses. Do we really want these people around anyhow? If the bus doesn't get them then they're more likely to step in front of your car causing you a larger headache than listening to Rachel Ray scream about cooking tomatoes. This really is a favor to society, not a problem. And it may be the best use of city buses since, at least here in Los Angeles, they are more of a traffic problem than a solution. (I'll be tackling that concept later.)