Halfwit and All Man

by Peter Rodman

  Although closures are spaced or combined whenever possible, some closures must be allowed, however inconvenient, in order to meet project deadlines and qualify for Federal and State grants or matching funds. The computer has identified 47 days when areas of downtown Sacramento encompassing 10 contiguous blocks or more will be completely gridlocked or impassable.

  Projections show that when 10 blocks are made impassible, traffic in the surrounding 100 adjoining blocks drops to an average speed of one and three-quarters miles an hour. Walking and bicycle riding are recommended on those days. The city is considering declaring those days "Traffic Holidays" and asking businesses to close.

  traffic coma

  So far, the worst predicted tie-up will be from Tuesday, July 14th through Friday, July 17th, 2009. The entire downtown area of roughly 300 blocks will be impassable to cars, trucks, and buses. Besides construction equipment, the only vehicles allowed in the area will be Light Rail. The trains will not stop, however.

  The central 30 blocks of the city will not even be safe for foot traffic. Fencing, and signs reading, "Sidewalk closed, use other side," will direct pedestrians in a huge counter-clockwise circle around the area. The less perceptive may circle for days.

  After July 17th, sections of the city will gradually open to traffic, and by Tuesday, July 21st traffic should have returned to its "normally impaired" condition.

  the future

  It is the city's intention that there be a No-Cone Day, and there very well may be. But if it happens on April 28th 2011, it will not be an annual event and probably will never happen again. Rather, as city density increases as a result of building upwards, the need for patching existing city services and overlaying new ones will become more and more pressing. A twenty-storey building covering a city block effectively adds 20 blocks to an area served by the same city services. Even if the building remains partially vacant and some of the services unused, the services have to be available, which means more and more service conduits will be needed along the city's primary utility easements--the streets.

  Although the traditional use of streets has been to move people from one point to another, as city densities have increased, property and services have become increasingly valuable, so much so that having people and traffic on the streets is now a profound inconvenience to the city's maintenance. Conceivably, there will be a time when the only traffic allowed on city streets will be construction, repair, and maintenance vehicles. Until that time, the flow of traffic can only become slower.

  Just Say No to What?

  Last night while I was puttering around in the living room, a couple of guys were stabbed in the street around the corner from my house. I didn't hear a thing.

  A year ago while I was sitting on my chair on the front porch and my wife was asleep in bed, a burglar stole my wife's purse from the living room.

  He came in through the back door, picked up the purse and must've panicked when he heard me walking across the porch; I heard the back screen door slam as I came in the front door. He got $8 and some credit cards that are now dead.

  In my neighborhood some of the houses have bars on the windows and ornamental cages on the porches.

  Part of this may be due to the neighborhood. There's an apartment complex a block to the west that seems like a good place to buy crank, and isolated houses on the blocks to the east exude filth and violence even when no one is around. But for the most part it isn't a bad neighborhood, and iron bars are out of place, however finely crafted.

  I think the owners of the bars are afraid of the News, and bars can't keep the News out. Perhaps they should stop watching the television news and stop reading the crime stories in the papers. Perhaps they should stop and examine their lives to see just how many members of their family have been killed, mugged, beaten, raped or died of drug overdoses.

  Most people will live perfectly secure lives and die of natural causes or in accidents--with or without barred windows. The average person may be robbed a few times, I know I have been, but burglars are not respecters of class or neighborhood, and generally don't meet their victims face to face. There's not much a person can do about burglars.

  Victims choose their victimizers. Not always, but often. A man is murdered horribly--look what the newspaper has to say about him. He either: a) did a little killing himself now and then, or b) ran around with people who killed people, or c) had friends who knew people that killed people.

  The dead man was probably shocked to find himself being killed, but over and over again, looking at what a person does leads me to believe that many victims are volunteers. Perhaps most victims are volunteers.

  Take a survey of 50,0000 people who have never used street drugs and don't plan to tonight. The number who show up dead in a hallway of a heroin overdose tomorrow morning will be very, very small. Perhaps it is society's fault that these people are not dead; perhaps the blame belongs on their parents or friends for not leading them astray. Whatever the cause, these people are stuck with being healthy one more day.

  The idea that victims participate in their crimes disturbs me; it sounds as if I'm starting to turn into a conservative. I take solace in reminding myself that the idea applies to Republicans as well as the poor.

  Stockbrokers hoping to pull a fast one end up cheated; real estate scammers find themselves bankrupted by their partners; politicians who would never consider actually changing their vote for money stand in line with their colleagues to take bribes from sincere FBI agents. Every one of them is a victim; every one of them chooses to associate with the people who hurt him.

  The actual number of unwitting victims is small. Random violence is good morbid reading, and the television crews can get some tense long-distance shots of SWAT teams slipping along the outside of buildings, but it isn't that often a person goes to a hamburger stand and ends up massacred. It's a fluke. The television has to gather misery from all over the world just to get together enough pictures to show you one horrible half hour a day.

  Stupidity has to be actively participated in; madness must be countersigned. This sounds an awful lot like you'll be okay as long as you don't volunteer. Or to put it another way, "Just say, 'No!'" This is really terrifying: Am I developing presidential thought processes?

  In a sense, yes--actually, no. The word "no" is an easy answer for two types of people. The first doesn't have the problem, isn't inclined to be the victim and would say no anyway. The second person follows popular fads and will say no as long as everyone else does, but may very well be drinking kiwi-flavored mineral water next week.

  How does a battered wife say "no" to the man she chose to marry and has two kids with? How does a kid who has known only street gangs say "no" to picking up a gun when the gang needs him? How does an addict who has seen people die of his drug say "no" to the one thing that will fix him now, at this very moment?

  They can't. If your life is madness, has always been madness and the only way you can see to getting through the day is by doing things the same way you always do, you have no chance to say "no." You can't even see what to say no to.

  A couple of mundane stories may illustrate this better.

  For years I drank in working-class bars that pushed being seedy. Several of them pushed pretty hard. Once in a while there would be a fight. Nothing too spectacular--no one was ever killed or more than a little maimed--just some shoving, yelling, punching and kicking. I was never mixed up in a bar fight, but always worried about them: the sudden knife, the sweep of a broken bottle, the small, noisy pistol--that sort of thing.

  To solve my problem, I took to drinking in better bars and sticking to the same bars. They were quieter and I got to know the people there.

  Naturally this didn't solve anything. A stranger would walk in, take the stool next to mine, start drinking and the fear would come back. Probably as a direct result of not being able to read people's minds, I was afraid of strangers, afraid when they started to glaze over from drink, afr
aid when they started saying and doing odd things.

  The problem and the fear were with me for years, and I couldn't see any possible solution. Then it became impossible for me to drink in bars, and after a few months I noticed the fear was gone. In a blinding flash of the obvious I discovered an enduring truth: people who don't go to bars don't get in bar fights. Or worry about them.

  Years of careful reasoning didn't show me that truth. All those years I could have just said no to bars, but I didn't have the slightest idea what the real problem was.

  Another story:

  A friend of mine needs to borrow $10 until payday. Again. He'll borrow some amount at least once a month, usually more often. A little less than half the time he pays me back.

  I have a loose $10 I can afford to lose, but I'm tired.

  "No," I say.

  "Oh, well, if you're short--"

  "I have ten bucks I don't need. I just don't want to give it to you."

  "That's a hell of an attitude," he says. "I thought we were friends."

  "We are." "Well, if ten bucks means more to you than our friendship--"

  "It doesn't," I say. "I'll still talk to you if I don't give you the ten bucks."

  And I do. We're still friends and he still asks, but he doesn't get money from me. It was only much later that I realized that if our friendship broke up it would be him that the ten dollars meant more to than our friendship.

  I gave away money and things for years simply because I couldn't see myself objectively enough to change. To say no. But for all those years there was no "just" for me.

  Few people have the insight to change themselves. Reading a book or two won't do it. A television special--even a PBS special--won't do it. Being preached at or healed by a minister won't do it. Reading the philosophers on how to live a good life won't do it. It's an inside job and no outside cure can touch the problem.

  But nothing works unless the victim hurts enough to change, and nothing "cures" the behavior.

  As old problems arise again, the victim's old answers suggest themselves as a solution--again. The only difference is that the victim finally recognizes the problem and knows that the old solutions don't work, so tries new ones. Life becomes a series of chances to say no. Every day becomes precious because every day is another chance to get through that day well: without pain, perhaps even with a little joy.

  Which is why I won't have bars on the windows of my house. No doubt a good set of bars will strain out all but the narrowest burglars, but I don't want to live in a jail or in a liquor store. There is no safety; only life.

  I won't run to the suburb desert to avoid life in the downtown swamps, and I won't imprison myself for fear of a thief. I will not countersign nameless fear. Nothing I own is so valuable that I'll agree to stripe the sunlight coming in my windows. I'll re-key the locks and engrave my driver's license number on the bigger stuff, but I don't have any business owning anything I can't bear to lose.

  Regardless of my poor attitude, I hope someday to die peacefully of natural causes.

  Peter Rodman can be contacted at:

  sardoweems@yahoo.com

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