Warning: Rant Crossing or Crossing Rant...

Update... got home tonight ... unscathed from my walkings around Oakland and San Francisco -- thank you very much, and read this! HAHAHAHA I wish I would have been there to gloat ... and that I could get some of that response from at least one of the places I have to cross every day.

I want to be compassionate, really. I want more than anything in the world to be compassionate ... especially with the people who most aggravate me. I try. And it is struggling against the tide most days to try to be compassionate when all you really feel is angry or frustrated. I believe in gun control largely because I know that if I had a gun, I would use it on all the people who desperately crave my compassion! I say all of this as a way to set the scene for the little rant I am about to write. I have decided after long deliberation that it should be in the form of an open letter to those who would be dead if I had a gun. It is not at all compassionate. I thought I was sending out love and compassion by not writing about it -- but in fact I am just poisoning my life slowly and painfully by holding it in. I think I am done with the preamble, but there may be more editorializing later. You are duly warned.

Dear People Who Have Never Learned the Use or Purpose of the Crosswalk:

I would like to start by indicating to you the proper use of a crosswalk: people who are not driving use marked walkway across a road that cars traverse to get to the other side. We do this because we need to get to the other side; not because we want it to take you two minutes longer to get to your destination or to make your life miserable or frustrated in any way. It is quite simple, you are in a car, we are not. It makes us slightly more vulnerable than you.

Your job when you approach a crosswalk is to see if it is in use. If it is in use, that is to say that there are either people waiting to cross or people actually crossing, it is your responsibility to STOP. Stop. Not slowly inch towards said people in order to intimidate them into walking faster or to keep them from venturing into the crosswalk. Especially when there is either a sign denoting that YOU MUST YIELD TO PEDESTRIANS (that's what they call us people who WALK) or a STOP SIGN, you MUST stop. It's not me asking you to do something that you don't want to do -- it's simply the LAW. Ah yes, laws, they do apply to you, people who drive cars are required to follow laws just like everyone else. [Don't think that I give any slack to bike riders who don't stop or to pedestrians who jay walk -- anyone who knows me understands that I go to the corner to cross -- it's polite but it's also the law.]

When you are trying to run me down in the crosswalk, this is what I think: do you have children?? I mean really, do you have children who will be required to do this thing we call walking sometime?? Follow up question: wouldn't you like other cars being driven by other people to stop for your children when they are crossing the street?? If so, then it might be worth your while to PRACTICE stopping!!!

I have to go out and WALK to the library to return a book right now -- I am hoping that if you are reading this that you are not in your car so that there might be one less person trying to run me down... I will have to cross no less than three streets there and another three back, anyone want to place a bet on the number of cars that will not want to stop when they see me in the crosswalk. I will be the one glaring and possibly yelling at the drivers who don't understand that thing called a crosswalk -- and it won't be pretty.

I added these lovely flowers in an attempt to lower my blood pressure before I have to back out and brave the streets -- that is to say the crazy drivers.