Appalling Behavior
To the Editor:
I am appalled. Appalled at people’s lack of caring about others and the "me first, the h—l with you" attitude of many. I am 67 and was out at Burke Lake Park recently with my grandchildren, ages 2 and 6 months. My wife and I had parked next to the handicapped parking and pulled up to the curb. She took the 2-year old and proceeded ahead of us and I got the infant in his carrier out from the driver’s side rear seat.
Because there wasn’t much space between the cars, I carried the car seat in both hands and consequently did not see the concrete bumper in front of the car in the handicapped space — there was no bumper in front of our space. I tripped over it falling with the infant in the carrier, became wedged between the car’s bumper, the curb and the infant seat. I had substantially skinned my knee and I could not move the baby’s car seat to leverage myself out from under the bumper to get up. The baby was crying and I am sure I had uttered some expletive.
No one stopped to help, not even the two women who were opening the trunk of the car in the handicapped parking space, which I had fallen in front of! It wasn’t until a few minutes later when my wife noticed we weren’t following her that she turned to come back to help.
Last month, an 83-year-old acquaintance of mine was leaving his apartment and had a heart attack on the sidewalk entrance. He lay unconscious on the sidewalk for over two hours and nobody stopped to help. He passed away several days later in the hospital’s intensive care unit. Had he gotten emergency care immediately he might be alive today and his grandchildren would still be having fun with grandpa.
We live on an intersection with four-way stop signs. I continuously witness cars treating the intersection as if these were yield signs or no signs at all. This includes adults with children in the car — a fine role model for the kid’s later driving years.
Driving on the Beltway or I-66 or I-95, I am constantly passed by cars traveling substantially over the speed limit and usually weaving in and out of traffic, creating a hazard to others. On more than one occasion I have been flipped off for going the speed limit. Just yesterday, a mother with kids in the car zoomed past me on the right in a lane that was ending only about 50-feet ahead and flipped me off as she went by.
These behaviors reflect a "me first" society that prefers to live vicariously with reality TV, choosing to follow 24/7 coverage of Paris Hilton rather than becoming involved with critical issues that affect humankind like the crisis of climate change, genocide and wrongly conceived wars. It appears that even given the power of the human intellect, the human race may well relegate itself to extinction like the dinosaurs in the vastness of geologic time even though we have the potential to do greater things. What a shame, what a waste.
Bob Flint
Fairfax