A Pet Peeve

A. Unabashed Pacifist:

How many pacifists does it take to change a light bulb?
None. They carry a light within. [Well, some do…]

B. Unabashed Christian:

Holy One,

How divine to put or restore the breath of life in a person. An obstetrician should relish the job of initiating the first breath in a new life. To breathe is to live.

To breathe is to inspire. To lose breath is to expire. Your breath inspires. Your comfort comes to the expiring. May it be so for us the living to know your inspiration. May it be so for those facing death to know your comfort.
Amen

C. Un-quoting Jesus:

“Okay, Dad. When I turn 30, I’ll move out on my own. Promise.”

[We don’t know if there was such a conversation. If there was, it wasn’t in English.]

D. Blog: A Pet Peeve

I get terribly frustrated with drivers who are overly polite. You know. The ones who after coming first to an intersection with a four-way stop will wave to others to go first. Instead of following the rules of the road, they follow some personal rule about performing random acts of kindness (maybe) or just don’t recall the rules of the road. All their “kindness” does is cause uncertainty about what they’re doing and prolong everyone’s stay at the intersection. Is that wave a greeting? Do they need assistance? Oh, I guess they want someone else to go first so they don’t have to commit to a driving decision based on what has been prescribed as safe driving practice.

One such driver caused me to be rear-ended the other day. Instead of proceeding through a perfectly fine green light that most drivers had been seeing as a signal to go on through the intersection, she saw someone waiting to enter the flow of traffic from a service station, and she decided to perform her random act of kindness for the day. Problem was she was paying no attention to vehicles behind her. As the vehicle from the gas station pulled into the intersection, I hit my brakes (at a light that had been green for quite some time, remember). The driver of the large pickup pulling a trailer could not avoid hitting my vehicle as the polite driver moved on down the road, oblivious to the fact that her act of kindness was a dangerous and unnecessary gesture that caused an accident in its wake.

Now, I’m all for acts of kindness. I just have a serious problem when drivers mix the impulse for kindness with stupidity.