MALL PEOPLE ARE PEDESTRIAN (Editorial)

Modern life is becoming increasingly complicated and nerve-wracking.  The tiniest of things can blow out of proportion until you're steaming angry, feeling beat up and abused, and you can't specifically say how you got in that condition.  Here's just a small example...

You're driving along in front of a strip mall line of stores at about fifteen miles an hour.  All you want to do is leave quietly, without hassle, because you've already had enough sticky social interactions in the stores with snide employees and ugly customers, parking lot jockeying, and sticker shock to last the rest of the month.  An innocent "sneaking-in-for-a-second-to-pick-up-a-little-something" with a coupon clipping evolves into a buzz-saw-through-your-head, dog-eat-dog episode of "Survivor".  But, you're almost out of the maze of insanity with freedom lying just beyond the ever-present persistent beggar with the cardboard sign at the exit. You rehearse your "I-have-no-change-creep" blank face while fully aware (and full of guilt, even though you haven't done anything wrong) the trunk is stuffed with crap you don't really need.  "Hey, the cat food was half-price," you tell yourself unconvincingly.  You proceed cautiously...

You're going just fast enough to get out of the packed parking spaces quickly but still slow enough to slam on the breaks if a kid or pet runs into your path.  Safe-and-sane are the considerations here.  You're a good person.  You have the patience of a saint.  No cash for beggars but that's okay.  You'll make up for it by tipping a waitress fifty extra cents next time...if you remember...So far, so good....

In the not-so-far distance, you notice someone leaving a store.  They are bolting like a semi-professional speed walker across the sidewalk toward the curb at a steadfast clip, head pointed forward, their body aimed at the same place you are pointed toward, a place of inevitable intersection of directions.  You ask yourself, "I wonder if they are going to stop or keep walking, oblivious to the fact I am driving right toward them in a big -- not invisible -- car?"

The mall shopper comes to the edge of the curb just as you are about ten feet away from where they are.  They look up, right at you, with their face washed in utter disdain as though you are the lowest form of dirt to ever exist.  It's pretty much the same face you'll be giving the beggar in a few moments.  You see the repugnant walker, plain as day, with every muscle in your body tensing as you wondered what the next five seconds will bring -- all the while lurching forward at the same rate of speed because now you're way too close to where they are going to, to pump the breaks to stop in time to not hit them if they step off the curb.

Then they do it.  They look away from you as though they never saw you coming at all and step off the curb into the driveway lane right in front of your car!  You smash your foot into the break pedal, causing centrifugal force to whiplash your carcass around while the car careens to a grinding halt.  You are in shock partly due to not having the breaks serviced in seven years -- and they worked! 

You are light-years beyond mad, awe-struck by the shopper's outrageous stupidity, grateful for their incredible fortune you were able to stop in time, fearful that in the future you won't be able to and you'll run someone over -- a stranger's death wasted when there are several "loved ones" you'd prefer to kill by running them over instead.  I mean, why fritter away an "accident" on an insignificant nobody when there are so many more deserving candidates?

You instantaneously review the last few seconds of your life.  My fault?  Their fault?  What are the laws here?  Any witnesses?  Of course, pedestrians have the right of way but surely in a game of Chicken between a person on foot and a moving vehicle, the person is going to loose.  A two-hundred-and-twenty-three pound woman in tacky polyester would appear in theory to be easier to cease walking for a beat or so as compared to the trajectory of a speeding three-ton vehicle, although I am no rocket scientist to know conclusively.

Then you picture the resulting scene in your mind's eye: their viscera goo spread over the hood and you having to go to the gas station car wash for the eight dollar -- not the six dollar -- Supreme Wash.  You will have to stare at the bumper dent their fat body made for years to come, every time you get in the car.  It's not fair.

What was "The Incredulous, Nasty Look" about anyway?  It was as though the indignant walker rudely dared you to hit them, calling you out, that they are somehow mysteriously impervious to harm like a Superhero, that they are shielded by unseen forces of beyond-common-sense self-righteousness, that they are just an ambulance-chasing lawyer away from your insurance pay-off riches, while you are a hapless nothing who must obey their laser-beam psychic command, like a bothersome fly hanging about who should know better than to be there if they want to continue living.  You know, the same look you get when you suddenly realize your relationship's honeymoon is over.

Should you get out of your car and wail on them until they are a bloodied pulp to teach them a life-lesson in a language they can understand or at least give them firm comeuppance about the virtue of hesitating by praising Jesus ad nausea and how their meaningless life was spared by divine providence, resulting in the two of you being "forever friends" and setting up Friday nights as spaghetti get-togethers? How about acquainting them with your middle fingers instead?  "Say hello to my little friends," you spout as you give 'em double barrels of fuck-yous.

Let's say you did accidentally run over the alleged homeless beggar at the exit.  It could happen, since beggars tend to position themselves too close for comfort to on-coming traffic and you can't see them very well because you are looking in any direction (perhaps into the blinding sun) but where they are at.  That death, even if he was caught in your car's bumper, drug miles to your house, lived for two days in the garage until he finally died of starvation (he doesn't deserve cat food), would warrant less than a minute of eleven o'clock news time.  Slightly brush the hem of a loud-mouthed lard-ass soccer mom who believes she owns the world -- or at least the strip mall -- and a nation-wide call for every mall throughout the lands be retro-fitted with flashing lights as a "idiot pedestrian crossing" would occur miraculously at tax-payers expense through a bond lasting for over four hundred years.

The fact is ignorant people breed more. There's millions of them and one of you.  Hit a couple and so what?   They'll be crippled for life, come out of the store in a wheelchair, see you, and push themselves off the curb into your path. It's a statistical probability.

I asked someone who is a retired high-powered lawyer what to do in such cases and he said, "Hit them."  That's life in the big city these days.  What a person has to go through to get cheap cat food...