The Traffic Light (Part Two)

(Editor's note:  This is the second and concluding segment in a two part series published under heading of The Traffic Light.  To view the first segment, click here.)

Does the ordinary citizen's pursuit of happiness come with any significant limitation?  Perhaps, we should just wait ...

The traffic light serves as a useful metaphor for the ordinary citizen’s interaction with change.  Some prefer the safety and comfort of a red light, indicative of all they know and all they care to know.  Sometimes, when the light turns green, all hell breaks loose.  Others detest the red light as evil and the mortal enemy of progress.  For them, the traffic light is always, or should always be, green in a perfect world.

But suppose there were a powerful force which had little interest in permitting the traffic light to change.  What happens then?

Recall the young Baptist minister, reared in Atlanta, well educated with a doctorate degree in theology.  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. advocated civil disobedience, but in a different way.  He preached nonviolent, direct action guided by the Christian ideal of love and not through racial hatred.  Jailed in Birmingham for such protests, Dr. King wrote that his people had been told to “Wait!” for constitutional (and God-given) rights for nearly 350 years.

By any reasonable measure that’s a long time to wait at a red light, while the cars with the green on the other side barely noticed.  It’s called empathy, and the lack thereof.  But reasoning correctly that wait usually meant never, Dr. King’s people were no longer willing to stand by and wait patiently for equal rights, that the “Time is now.”

The phenomenon of the 1960s sit-ins, the civil rights march on Washington, D.C. and his powerful “I have a dream” speech were embedded into American culture.  Meanwhile, the mass exodus of Southern white Democrats to the Republican Party seemed to coincide with, and may have been facilitated by, these events.  Presently, that powerful constituency comprises the party’s affluent conservative base.

Some fear change --- others embrace it --- all in the constancy of our predictable human nature.  Do we dare risk the folly of changing a classic Rembrandt painting?  Sometimes, as Theodore Roosevelt has noted, the institution fittest to survive tends in fact to survive the change whirling about relatively unscathed:

It is true, as the champions of the extremists say, that there can be no life without change, and that to be afraid of what is different or unfamiliar is to be afraid of life.  It is no less true, however, that change may mean death and not life, and retrogression instead of development.

Change is messy.  Great achievement is all but impossible absent an individual willing to incur a dangerous level of risk that is unacceptable to most.  The first person through or over the wall always gets hurt.  This ordinary yet peculiar but necessary citizen gets beaten up, beaten down and absorbs the full brunt of the damaging blows of an entrenched status quo.  Taking it square in the teeth, the innovative risk taker oft becomes a regrettable front line casualty.  But the process exposes the powerful force of resistance as a dying voice.

Recently, President Obama stated that “I am not going to walk away from 40 million people who have the chance to get health insurance for the first time.”  It’s an admirable undertaking which has befuddled presidents dating back to T.R. a hundred years ago.

At a time when the richest 400 Americans possess more wealth than the bottom 150 million combined, consider that these stark numbers do not lie.  At the traffic light they present a distorted reality from what one may have come to expect.  One privileged car commands the favored state road on a long, uninterrupted green for every 375,000 cars jammed in at the crossroad red.  The one car, in turn, provides consideration to a small percentage of the latter group to keep it that way.  Everyone, it seems, must wait.

Dare to engage in a social science project charged with the responsibility of adjusting the flow at that particular traffic light?  Such an intellectual exercise may prove enlightening.  The requisite, independent traffic studies are completed, and demonstrate beyond doubt that the timing and sequence must change.  But it doesn't end there.  Where human nature is concerned, perhaps the individual who happens to have things in abundance and consequently the perpetual green light has a valid point and typically the final say:  Do pretty much whatever you want in your pursuit of happiness, but just don’t try to change my status quo.

Who wants to be first over that wall?

-Michael D’Angelo

The Traffic Light (Part One)

(Editor's note:  This is the first segment in a two part series.)


What may we learn from the cycling of a solitary traffic light from red to green and back again?

Long distance travel by auto remains a favorite family pastime, especially during the busy holiday season.  Often, a pilgrimage to the home of relatives is the only occasion a family may have to spend meaningful time together as a unit, all in one place.  In their children parents anticipate the pleasure of a captive audience.  For children, extended travel offers a host of valuable new experiences.  It is a time when lasting memories are born.

As the family car meanders along one of the nation’s many rural state roads, invariably it encounters a lonely traffic signal.  Often, it is the only traffic light in small town America.  Fortunately, traffic is not terribly heavy, but thank goodness the light is green anyway.  And we speed on through without giving it another thought.

The intersection is often empty.  But sometimes a lone car or two may wait, patiently, for the light to change.  A certain curiosity may develop as to how long these cars have been waiting, what they may be up to.  As these cars disappear in the rear view mirror of our adventures, surely the light which is now behind us must change for them at some point, that they should be permitted to cross.  What is their story?  Occasionally, what may seem like more cars than the little town possesses are backed up to the traffic light.  The first thought of the passing motorist may be how all those cars got there and what the attraction is in the first place.

Eventually, the traffic light turns in a three part cycle, first from green, to the yellow caution, and finally to red.  The yellow permits cars driving at highway speeds sufficient time to properly judge long stopping distances and decide whether to stay on the gas pedal and continue through the intersection or hit the brake and come to a safe, controlled stop.  The yellow light is a product of the country road.  Typically, it does not even exist in the city, where the traffic light contains only a two part cycle, going from green directly to red.  Long stopping distances are of minimal concern in the physical confines of the city, where things happens faster.

At state road intersections the traffic light for the small town crossroad tends to be red for a long time.  The change to green allows as many cars to pass through safely as the short cycle permits, depending on driver reaction time.  Logic predicts better than chance that when reaction time is coordinated, more cars pass.  When it is uneven, there will be fewer.  Those cars toward the rear may be destined to wait for more than one cycle to get through.

The change to green also elicits familiar reactions drawn from the range of driving habits.  The daydreamer returns to earth just in time to barely clear the short cycle before the light is red again.  The impatient floors his older car, the one with the manual transmission, carburetor and loud exhaust pipes.  Invariably the car jerks and stalls out.  He’ll have to await the next cycle, as will the angry people stuck behind him.  The risk tolerant tests fate, taking a chance after due circumspection, and crosses against the red light.  If there are no other cars around, no traffic camera to record the transgression, then what’s the harm?

In a multi-racial, economically stratified, complex industrial society, the traffic light serves as a useful metaphor for the ordinary citizen’s interaction with change.  Some actually prefer a red light.  It represents the safety and comfort of what they know, indispensable to the measured progress of an established order whose inconvenience is trifling and may be overlooked.  For on occasion, when the light turns green, all hell breaks loose, and chaos abounds.  This is to be avoided at all costs.  Others come out on the opposite side, detesting the red light as evil and the mortal enemy of progress.  For them, the traffic light is always, or should always be, green in a perfect world.

But suppose there were a powerful force which had little interest in permitting the traffic light to change.  What happens then?

(Editor's note:  The second and concluding segment in this two part series continues the discussion of change in the context of The Traffic Light, touching upon issues ranging from civil rights, to access to affordable health care, to record levels of wealth disparity in the US today.)


-Michael D’Angelo