Rambling

Sections of the California Harbor Freeway 110 were completed around 1985. It joins Los Angeles to San Pedro on the Pacific coast.  Parts of the highway, taking North and South together, are twelve lanes wide. The other day a driver was shot to death by a shooter in another vehicle. The young man was only 20, and handsome, and in college, beloved by his mother shown on television weeping uncontrollably, begging for witnesses to step forward. Nobody has come forward.

I was driving South when it happened. An ambulance, and a police car passed, sirens wailing. There were already helicopters overhead. Passing the scene on the North bound side I saw perhaps ten police cars, and at least twenty uniformed policemen walking around with measuring tapes. The victim's car, I later learned driving home shortly afterwards, was the one crashed into the dividing wall. Going by my daily newspaper, and evening news, no progress has been made in solving the murder. I did hear on television that many shots had been fired. The policemen with measuring tapes were probably collecting bullets and spent cartridges.  I'd never seen so many policemen in one place before.

That engineering marvel, the Harbor Freeway runs through South Los Angeles. Not far from the scene of the murder is Malcolm X Avenue which runs beside a small Muslim Temple. Nearby, also, is a thoroughfare named after Martin Luther King Jr.  Not far away, just a few miles, is the King Drew County Hospital. The Victim of the Highway shooting was African American.

I intend to make no case or comment. Yet, that is utterly impossible in fact. Put A next to B and the result is some new entity, AB.

Road rage must take many forms, and happen everywhere. I believe the government no longer publishes the number of highway fatalities. Could there exist a belief that numbers induce more numbers? Of course millions more acts of kindness and caution happen on the highways than do acts of madness. We are saved by that fact, the innate goodness of people, and our desire for loving connectedness.

Barry