Reactors

Today on my way to the bridge, coming home from work, I passed by a hundred or so stopped cars. It's moments like those when you're grateful for a bike. When I reached the cause of the stoppage I found that it was caused by a vehicle that the police had pulled over to the side of the bridge. The odd thing was that it wasn't really obstructing the road - anyone could've passed by at a reasonable pace if they'd wanted to. But they didn't. (Almost) everyone was leaning out of their windows gawking at the coppers and the two shifty looking fellows who seemed to have been driving the car. Once the traffic got past all that it sped up to a normal flow pretty quickly. On that side of the road. On the other side the same phenomenon was occuring - hundreds of cars were backed up for kilometres. And whatever was going on at the bridge wasn't even that interesting.

Humans are great marksmen in a very specialised area - we never fail to shoot ourselves in the proverbial foot. Forget environment, chance or supernatural powers - we far excel any of them in the ability to get ourselves into trouble. Any outside observer of our planet would probably deduce that it was an art form. We often take pride in the fact that we've extricated our rears from various tight spots down the millenia, but the real situation more closely resembles a panicked man flailing about in a bog; we're making progress, yes: mostly in the downwards direction. Boasting of our survival reflexes we claim to be the greatest of the animals. That's an accomplishment, I suppose, but Man is capable of much more than that - we have been given the gift of Action. And what have we done with it? We've left it under the Christmas tree, content to play with the simpler, easier - and far inferior - Reaction.