While making my way over a crosswalk at Minnesota and Newport avenues, the flashing lights alerted drivers who fly down that street to slow down or stop (optional! it’s a yellow light!), and wait for pedestrians. I was walking as quickly as I reasonably could with a full coffee in one hand and a dog on a leash trying to yank my arm out of its socket in the other. You, a pasty-faced, brown-haired white dude in a beat-up late-model Toyota, somehow felt the need to yell out the window for me to walk faster—an order you punctuated with an expletive. Even if I was shuffling across the street with a walker, who taught you that you were so special that you didn’t have to wait at crosswalks for pedestrians, that you were entitled to drive at whatever speed or in whatever fashion suited your disposition? Who taught you that you could plow through traffic at your discretion, probably because you are too lazy to apply the brakes? Spoiler alert: You don’t own the roads, and will probably remain dumb and angry for the rest of your life. At least that’s my consolation.
I Saw You is an anonymous “man on the street” column. Email your rants and raves about co-workers or any badly behaving citizens to
iS*****@me*******.com
, or send to 380 S. First St, San Jose, 95113. Submissions should stick to about 100 words.
