/rant
Yes, the strange pipe bomb-looking packages duck-taped all around town Monday turned out to only be cameras for a college student’s art project, but good God, does anybody ever think things through before they do them?
Do your projects. Get that A+. Be creative. Or show the activist in you. Save the whales. Protest the government, or a war, or whatever strikes you. But stop screwing the rest of us over while you’re getting your point across.
Looking at the empty highway and rows and rows of cars at a standstill for 3 hours on I-75/85 brought me back to an incident that happened to me years ago, when my son was in elementary school.
I can’t remember what the protest was about, but some people chained themselves together in the streets and obstructed traffic and I got caught up in it on the way home from work. Because I was a single parent, my son was in his After-School program, and the teachers did not play with you when it came to the deadline for pick-up. I was in a full panic by the time I reached the school just after dark and the 6 PM deadline (I’d been in the car for an hour and a half instead of the usual 25 minutes). Sure enough, they had already called the police (for child abandonment) and tacked on a late fee of $25. to my account.
I couldn’t blame them for that. Those rules had come about in the first place because of parents who had no qualms about foisting their kids off on the school while kicking back at Happy Hour somewhere.
I blamed the protesters because, guess what? The government or whoever didn’t give a hoot nor a holler about them blocking traffic. The people that the protest was aimed at were at home on time and enjoying their stress-free evenings without a care in the world. The folks suffering from the protest were people like me, an exhausted, overworked and underpaid single mother who almost had to face the cops to get my kid back and who couldn’t afford any extra money out of my check that week if my kid was going to eat.
This is 2015. Homemade bombs are blowing up and taking life every single day across the world. We’re post-9/11. We’re post-Boston. Our Atlanta Olympics were bombed. People died. And it doesn’t occur to you that anything resembling a bomb on a bridge downtown might set off a panic? *insert koo-koo chimes here* Give me a break.
There were 18 cameras duck-taped around town. The guy who spotted the one on the bridge downtown absolutely should have called it in because you never know. If it had been a bomb and gone off, everyone would be pissed and dogging the authorities out for not doing their jobs.
WHO’s going to get close enough to read that sign before calling the authorities? No one!
In those 3 hours Monday, anyone with a medical condition or in labor was at risk even with a cell phone. No one would’ve been able to get to them or find their car in that mess. Ambulances were trapped and couldn’t answer calls or get patients they had to the ER. Parents couldn’t get to their kids or were written up for not returning to work (well, those goes that raise). I can bet you more than one small business lost income because their clients or deliveries never arrived. Et cetera.
It’s called a snowball effect, and it ain’t pretty.
Be more creative and not so thoughtless, folks. I know you can do it.
/endrant
Manuscript. Head. Drawer. 