I have a long drive to work every day. I know right? Here I am writing this amazing Substack yet I still have to pump out the daily grind of going to work to pay for the Ukraine war. I hate the drive, and I hate that I have to do it because my employer involuntarily relocated me to a much more distant site, not the point. My 4:30am drive takes me through a couple large towns (they call them cities down here Alabama), lingering road construction, 2 lane, 4 lane, 5 lane, and back to 2 lane roads, past several Dollar Generals, and even a well-known speed trap. I’m surprised to see someone pulled over every morning through there around 5am because you’d think by now the same people going to the same jobs on this same route would have it figured out by now. But they don’t. There is one common theme along the whole route: Broken Stoplights.
Oh the joy of sitting at a broken stoplight at 4:30 in the morning, watching it go through its extended light cycle and giving a green light and a green turn arrow to the ghosts that are apparently waiting in the cross-traffic lanes. To know that someone…ahem….has taken the time to reach out to his County Commission to get the matter taken care of, only to be told “ALDOT says that the light is working as designed.” One of the lights anyways, along the arduous daily trek to my tax revenue production location. Another light in question is in one of these lingering road construction zones where the actual road construction finished quite some time ago but the signage is still there and of course the broken stoplight they left us with. Still yet are a series of other stoplights in one of these large towns that revert to a timer in the wee hours of the morning that have absolutely no coordination with each other and almost seem to be programmed on purpose to make the miles-long trip through town as painful and irritating as possible. Oh you thought you were gonna go? Nope! Green turn arrow for absolutely no one who is waiting in the oncoming lane. Sucker.
These Broken Stoplights are great analogy for the malaise and incompetence we are inundated with on a daily basis in almost every facet of our modern lives. This malaise and incompetence stems from none other than our own government, be it local, state, or Federal. Sloppy, careless, half-completed jobs have stricken the American way of life, but instead of correcting the problems and preventing them in the future we just excuse them away and lower our standards. “The stoplight is broken, fix it” gets met NOT with “ok,” but “well the _______ government entity responsible says that it works just fine so we suggest planning ahead and counting on extended drive times due to this thing that’s not broken.” Instead of actually fixing the things that put this country $31T in debt the answer Our Betters give is “we just need to raise taxes and possibly, maybe a tad bit, slow down the out-of-control spending that got us here. Possibly, but not probably.” The serious problem of low military recruitment and dwindling personnel numbers isn’t the obvious “maybe stop using the military as a social experiment at taxpayer expense,” but rather “well we’ve pulled all of these completely implausible excuses out of our collective butts so we don’t have to mention the obvious problems.” The list could go on forever and include so many topics such as trade agreements, foreign policy (Ukraine), immigration, Congressmen who shag Chinese spies, Senators who are far beyond their use-by date, public schools, police forces, the energy sector, child sexual mutilation, and the auto industry – to name a few.
We have obvious answers to a lot of the problems in society and most of them involve using the word or phrases “no” or “stop” or “not anymore” and my favorite, “I choose not to participate.” Society has been conditioned into a “yes ma’am/sir/gender fluid person” mentality and completely incapable of saying “no” any longer. This is a problem. It’s the spoiled brat problem we all see in children who are spoiled brats. We have become a world of instant gratification with Same Day Delivery, Instacart, Grub Hub, and “complete this quick survey after your purchase.” Anything that is asked or tasked is supposed to be met with “yes, right away” or any reply really that just doesn’t refuse the issue at hand.
Well there’s nothing wrong with refusing. Back-in-the-day when kids didn’t shoot up their schools was the same back-in-the-day when kids were told “no” a lot. And had their butts spanked on the regular. Refusing things is a completely rational response to things you just don’t want to do or agree with. Refusing things to other people helps to instill patience, but more importantly it gives a period for reflection and introspection. A cooling off period if you will, that allows time for wisdom and experience to make their appearance.
A lot of these inefficient, sloppy, negligent things we do in society happen as a knee-jerk reaction to something else. Take Covid for example; “2 weeks to flatten the curve” turned into 3 years of insanity and power-tripping morons trying to control every little thing in your life. “Mask up or you’re going to jail!” ended up being a completely useless measure and good only as a placebo. “Hurry up and get the covid vaccination” has turned out to be nearly useless at best but at worst has caused countless vaccine injuries worldwide. The knee-jerk yes-man reaction to Covid has killed a whole lot of innocent people in our world. Regarding the whole Covid thing, my reply was “I choose not to participate” when it came to the lockdowns, the masking, the distancing, the tinpot ‘vaccine,’ etc. None of that based on any real science or research, all just a knee-jerk reaction by Our Betters - at best. At worst we see it was all a Fauci-ism plot to reduce the world’s population. The appropriate amount of reflection and introspection could have solved a lot of that insanity. Reflection and introspection could save us from a lot of our current daily insanity, if we had a sense of patience developed enough to apply it.
Practice your patience, friends. Learn to say “no” and starting saying it. Choose to not participate. Take time for reflection and introspection. All of these things will help you become ungovernable. When enough of us become ungovernable, things can get back to normal. Then, we will finally be able to get these Broken Stoplights fixed. Happy Hunting and Semper Fi.
I sympathize but when I took my current job I lived in another state and the first thing I did here was find a house near the interstate with only one stoplight the entire 14 miles to work. In New England the roads are jammed with out of state vacationers determined to have a good time as they sit in traffic with the rest of us. But at least there's only the one stoplight.