Go on a college campus, and you’ll see it. Many colleges have streets of some sort running through them, like UCLA has many of, or at least a road encircling the main campus, separating it from parking lots and dorm facilities and whatnot. So there’s usually ample opportunity to witness the spectacle that has long boggled my mind.
Basically, whenever you’re driving along one of these roads on or near a college campus, at some point, you’re going to see someone, most likely a student, blithely wander across the road without looking up to see if there are any cars coming. Often, they’ll be focused on their phone or other such device, sometimes it will be an actual book if they’re old-school, but many times, it’s none of those and nothing else that you’ll be able to discern. Maybe they’ll be at an actual cross-walk, but that’s not guaranteed. All that’s sure is that they are relying completely and totally on the attention of everyone else to keep them safe and unharmed.
I can, in a variety of ways, completely understand people who drive distractedly. I don’t particularly like such people, and do my best to avoid them, but I can conceptualize the mindset in play. Being in a car often gives certain people a mistaken impression of invulnerability, as if the metal shell surrounding them, and the seatbelt, and the airbag behind the wheel, the abstract sense of disconnection from the outside a closed window can produce, all of that will protect them and keep them safe from harm, so it’s not that big a deal to spend five minutes futzing with the radio. As I said, it’s a mindset that’s almost completely wrong and dangerous and which has led to many injuries and deaths, but I understand it.
Being completely unprotected by any of that, just a normal fleshy personage exposed and vulnerable, and striding uncaringly into a stream of large, heavy, metal contraptions hurtling along at multiple miles per hour, with the simple confidence that nothing will happen to you because other people are probably trying hard not to hit you? That, I just don’t get.
I first really noticed the behavior on college campuses, as I alluded to above, but it’s not restricted to them. Every day, I can find examples of people who are only alive and/or unhurt because someone else was paying attention. While driving my daughter to school, I nearly collided with a bicyclist who had chosen, for no reason he could enunciate or that I could figure, to cross the street right at a point where the road comes out of a blind curve, at a time of day where the sun shines directly into on-coming driver’s windshields, on an incline which reduced his own speed to barely a crawl. If I had been driving any faster than I was (I drive slowly there regardless of where the sun is, because, hey, it’s a blind curve), or if the sun had been at an even slightly lower angle, or if I had been in any way even the slightest bit distracted, I probably would have collided with him, rather than managing to stop with the maybe two feet of clearance we wound up with. Last month I saw someone nearly get run-over by a speeding driver when they stepped out into the street before the walk-sign became lit, only to be saved by the expedient of their companion yanking them back onto the curb just in the nick of time. And then yelling at them to pay more attention.
This little rant is not meant to excuse bad or distracted driving, of course. More collisions, including pedestrian-versus-vehicle, are caused by driver error and distraction. And it’s hard to fault someone for not hearing the quiet hum of that stealthy predator, the deadly Prius. But the simple fact that any pedestrian-versus-vehicle incidents are caused by pedestrians (in some municipalities, even, it’s a majority) just blows my mind.
The “not paying attention to large metal killing machines” aspect is just an element of the larger issue, I suppose: some people just don’t pay attention to their surroundings. A few days ago I watched a woman walk directly under a lowered bank of stage-lights, so that at one point the top of her head was all of two or three inches from a very hot, very heavy light. The lights were being worked on by the stage manager, and if he hadn’t lifted the whole thing at just the right moment, the woman could well have ended up with at least a bump to the forehead, more likely a good solid burn and some scorched hair. When I questioned her about the near-miss, she confessed that she hadn’t seen the lights and had no idea she’d come anywhere near them. She’s wasn’t maliciously trying to give the stage-manager a bad day, she wasn’t actively taking a risk and daring the universe to take her down, she just didn’t notice.
I’m glad that I don’t seem to be one of the people who just don’t notice the world around them (my job would be much more difficult if I wasn’t a student of human reactions), but seeing them out and about does make me wonder how close any of us comes to disaster, without ever realizing it.
Thank goodness someone else has said this! It’s a pet peeve of mine, especially since moving to LA. (I could give epic examples from living in NY, but this kind of thing does seem more prevalent here.)
I’m wondering if it’s a side effect of virtual reality? People don’t believe in actual reality anymore. They seem to be expecting to find a Reset button, or one that says “Start this game over.” (Drivers, too — as if the windshield is a big flatscreen TV.)
Our society in general seems to have a problem connecting actions (causes) with consequences (effects). Hence the parents of a nine-year-old suing a zoo when their child took a dare from his friends and climbed into a cage clearly marked as containing bears. Not only was the boy showing a lack of awareness of consequences, but the parents? They’re angry at the zoo for not doing their (the parents’) job, expecting them to be responsible for the child’s safety. It’s always someone else’s fault, which I would imagine is pretty cold comfort.
As the zoo’s spokesperson so aptly said, the cages were designed to keep animals in, not people out. I would add that the SIGNS are designed to keep *people* out. And that common sense is by no means as common as the name would lead us to believe.
For my part, I’m going to keep looking both ways before crossing a street, and taking responsibility for my own safety, thank you.