Tue, 14 Dec 2004
Last night on the way home I stopped at a red light on Dean Street -- not an unusual event by any means. Except that the light didn't turn green.
Even before we learn to drive, we learn that red means stop and green means go. We learn which side of the yellow line to drive on -- somehow paint becomes a physical barrier that we all (mostly) obey. When the light doesn't turn green, there's nothing physically stopping us from driving. And most of the time when this sort of thing happens we eventually make a group decision to take the traffic laws into our own hands. But in this case the second car in line was a police car -- anyone who decided to disobey the light would have to do so knowing that they could then get pulled over, depending on how much of a jerk the policeman felt like being.
While we were all sitting there wondering what would happen next, I thought of a story I read in a Spanish class years ago. The story was La Autopista del Sur by Julio Cortazar, and it's about a traffic jam that lasts two years. It's a very surreal story about what happens when the natural (ok, in the case of traffic, artificial) order of things becomes interrupted.
Anyway, after about 10 minutes of sitting at the light, one man got out of his car to ask permission of the police officer to disobey the traffic light, and we all got on our way. For ten minutes we were paralyzed, trapped by a system we all accept without thinking, and suddenly aware of it.
[/stories]
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