The Solutions Are Easy

I’ve really got no fix here.

I watch the traffic lined up after a concert.  Humanity has more than a few solutions to traffic problems, but we insist on consuming 25+ square feet each and making traffic jams.  Screw the solutions, we’ll be idiots instead.

I’ve seen someone mainline heroin and OD, only to know they lay dead a short time later.  There’s a solution for that too.  It starts well before the simple idea of don’t do drugs and strangely it has nothing to do with drugs.  Again, humanity throws band aids at the severe laceration when the solution is right before our eyes.  Again, humanity chooses to move forward in ignorance, using excuses like the “drug war”.

We’ve seen poverty of untold degrees right amidst our civil and developed nations.  Just take the Mississippi Delta as an example.  We have untold number of solutions to this problem, yet we can’t seem to truly implement any of them.  Again, refusal to deal with the root of the problem persists the problem itself, often in even more intense ways.

Starvation, a problem that again, so many solutions exist.  But the root isn’t resolved, instead we throw a few fish here or there, but heaven forbid we teach anyone to actually fish.

All these metaphors.  But if I actually stated easy solutions to these problems, people would just argue endlessly about their validity.  As is reality.

Oh well.  Cheers.

A Few Blurbs

Blurd – Getting to OTC

I’m sitting at building #40 on the Microsoft Campus today, waiting for one of the campus’ shuttles. They come every 10 minutes during this time of the day, so says the front desk staffers. After a few minutes this appears to be true, with shuttle #362 arriving for pickup.

I board and we head off to other buildings between here and OTC. As we roll onto 156th Avenue toward OTC on this sunny day, there are motorcycles and cyclist enjoying the dry tarmac and clear roadways. The clear aspect will be decimated in just a few more minutes when the rush hour deluge begins.

Blurd – Suicide Runner

He probably wasn’t aiming for suicide, but it sure seemed that way. With the right two lanes having backed up traffic I rolled a solid 30 miles per hour along the third lane. With a full green signal a man comes barreling across the street with shopping bags of stuff. I begin to brake within a second and immediately check my left for traffic. With the lane clear and the impossibility of stopping I begin to veer in case my blaring horn doesn’t stop this shopper in time. He responds by stopping forcefully, with his progress halted I roll by with no casualties today.

For a moment I had the angst of someone’s pending death being handed to me. Instead I breathed calmly and onward rolled. A life saved by quick reflexes.