Übergibson

So this afternoon I see a number of new stop signs near where my mom lives in Miami Beach. These weren’t regular stop signs, but more like what I would call “harassing” stop signs. These signs were not put in a normal intersection. No, they were put on all sides of a tee intersection, where a little side road meets the main road. There is absolutely no need for a stop sign there at all, to say nothing of an all-way stop situation like they have there now. I assume they’re there in some kind of attempt to slow the traffic, or maybe to discourage outsiders from using the road. Who knows. Whatever.

But now that I’m thinking about stop signs, I think it’s even dumber than it seems. What the hell are stop signs for anyway? I am totally not a stop sign kind of guy. I roll through those fuckers on a daily basis if nobody’s coming the other way. As a reasonable human with half a brain should do. There is absolutely no need for a person with higher than brussel sprout IQ to come to a complete stop if there are no other cars on the roads. Duh. But no, that kind of common sense thinking can get you a ticket or worse around here. Bah.

See, what I would do, if I were boss of the world, would be to use yield signs. You hardly ever see those things, and I think it’s a shame because all stop signs can be replaced by yield signs. It’s very simple. There you go. If you’re in a really really really tricky spot you could use a traffic circle, but that should be discouraged as much as possible in the interest of simplicity.

This would clearly define the responsibilities of the drivers who use the intersection, and assign guilt in the case of an accident. Responsibility, people. We need to get out of the uncle-sam-is-my-mommy-and-will-protect-us-from-our-stupid-selves mindset and start taking ownership of how we interact with eachother in our society. We are not mentally challenged children who need to be taken by the hand and walked to the bus stop by Big Brother. I think that everyone deserves to be given enough rope to hang themselves. Without the scope of free will to exercise your responsibility what kind of citizens can we ever be? I’ll tell you: we’ll be the kind who ask not what we can do for our country, but what our country can do for us.