The Law That's Not A Law

Once in a while, I’ll sit in the car and listen to the radio while Laura goes into the supermarket for something.

Outside almost every supermarket, there will be a marked pedestrian crosswalk, equipped with an octagonal red “Stop” sign.

The sign is in appearance and size the very same as the stop signs at the perimeters of the supermarket parking lot. It’s the same as any other “public street” stop sign.

But it’s different, somehow. Many drivers perceive that the signs in front of the store are “optional.” The signs leading out to public streets are not optional. I see few scofflaws at these junctures.

So sitting there waiting patiently for Laura one day, I decided to study the demographics. I tried to take a scientific poll. Who stops? Who doesn’t?

White drivers? Poll indecisive. Black? Brown? Nope. Those who don’t stop or do stop can’t be identified by race.

Older drivers, younger drivers. Same result. Couldn’t develop any meaningful statistic to support one or the other.

How about gender? Inconclusive. For one thing, I can’t necessarily determine gender underneath what passes for fashion these days. Test failed. Sample too furry.

Though I couldn’t substantiate it with my informal scientific statistics, I would be especially cautious, as a pedestrian, if I saw a vehicle coming that was being driven by a teenaged girl.

See, the rules are already different in grocery store pedestrian crosswalks. Add in the factor that the rules are different for teenaged girls, and you have a potentially volatile, violent, injurious situation.

Thursday night I saw a teen girl driving a Hummer. At the same time, an old woman was creeping out of the Safeway, a few groceries in her walker basket.

To avoid stopping for a slow old person, the Hummer girl drove around the stop sign on the left, blew rapidly through the stop sign without even a foot on the brake, and went Marlboro-smoking on her self-important way.

I suppose we should be grateful she didn’t simply run over poor Mrs. Old And In The Way.

Why are some stop signs optional? Or, why are stop signs optional depending on location?

It harkens back to the invention of the “yield” sign. We should never have put “yield” into practice. It has eroded driving manners to the point that even rudimentary driving manners no longer exist. For freeways, “merge” would have been much better.

It has to do with enforcement, as well. Drivers know – especially teen girls somehow – that tickets won’t be issued for failure to stop in a private parking lot, even though the sign itself is official in shape, color and size.

All these years later, the word “Stop” does not stand for “Squeal Tires on Pavement.” Nor does it stand for “Spit Twice on Policemen.” It still doesn’t mean “Slip Through on Purpose.”

It means “alto.” It means nothing other than “stop.”

My neighbors who live up Third Avenue would think I am an old fuddy duddy. From my living room, I watch as they interpret “stop” as “yield.” I watch as they neither yield nor stop. Driving decorum is gone.

Self-importance rules. Some of my neighbors don’t even cast a minimal glance to the left or right, they simply run through.

How they keep from being in crash after crash is a mystery to me.

The Handicapped Permit

The authorities will tell you that the “stop sign” rule can’t be enforced at the supermarket because it’s on private property.

Ahem.

The handicapped permit rule can definitely be enforced, not ten feet from the invisible stop sign. The “law” can be enforced by the same police department that is functionally unable to enforce the stop sign.

I know this for a fact. In my files somewhere I have my citation. Ulp. One day I absent-mindedly put up an expired permit – a permit I should have discarded.

Bang. I didn’t have to go to jail or post bond. But my outdated permit was enough to attract the attention of the female cadre, the parking lot Gestapo. They were on the scene of the crime in a matter of seconds.

Eventually, I pleaded stupidity and didn’t have to pay a fine. It could have cost me a thousand dollars.

A bigger question

All right. I have for many years been the owner of a “handicapped parking” permit, both here and in California.

Laura doesn’t use my permit. Unless I’m with them, my friends don’t use my permit.

I look down my nose at people who park in the blue zone without the state-issued permit. I make a character judgment.

But is the handicapped parking law and system correct and proper? No, it’s not.

Decade after decade, I continue to swear to the State of Colorado that I am STILL permanently disabled. I do this so that I may receive my little blue wheelchair insignia permit.

But my action puts me in a special class of people, a group of individuals with extraordinary privilege. I’m special because I’m crippled.

This goes radically contrary to my childhood teaching. My Dad wished for me to be “normal.” He insisted I learn to ski, to skate, even to play school football so that I wouldn’t be separated in that way from the other children.

My Mother would smack me upside the head if I displayed any self-pity. I would be in for her best sarcastic tongue-lashing if she thought I was playing the “polio card.”

They both wanted me to be normal. I think anyone who has a handicapped permit couldn’t qualify as “normal.”

But I think I’ll hang on to my permit. I never said I wasn’t a hypocrite.

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Word of the Week: Pensile. It’s from the Latin, pensilis or the verb pendere, to hang, as in pendulous. Pensile means hanging, or having or building a hanging nest, as the Baltimore oriole. And not the baseball players.