I hope this is the place to discuss off-topic things. I have laryngitis have been told to take a day off work (today) and rest my voice and continue not talking (even whispering) aloud for 3 days (so I won't be talking aloud to anyone until Monday [at the earliest]).
So I thought typing here would help me in the way that I'm not talking aloud to people and atleast I can communicate in some way. Because, believe it or not, when you don't talk to people, even when people are around, it kinda puts your mind in a state as if you were still in an empty room by yourself.
Anyways, on to my off topic discussion, in the title.
A police officer pulled me over and asked me if I knew what I did wrong. I told him I didn't, and he told me that I was going through a yellow light, it turned red at some point, and that all the police officers were having this yellow light campaign, where they pull people over and warn them [may have been a state wide police yellow light campaign]. They weren't ticketing, just warning.
Subconsciously I realized yesterday that this made me drive less safely than what I did before. When I see a green light, and know I have plenty of room between me and the car ahead, I will actually speed up just because the light is green. Let's say the speed limit on a road is 55 mph and I am only traveling 40 mph approaching the green light. If I see I have room to speed up then I do - I was thinking I can legally gun it all the way up to 55 mph without exceeding the speed limit.
This may seem at first that it's still safe because I'm not putting the car in front of me at risk as I know I have PLENTY of room to speed up and slow down before I get to that vehicle. However, there can be cars stopped in the opposite direction, who also have the green light, that are looking for an opening to legally turn left onto another road. My speeding up as I have been doing probably does not work itself into the mind of the person trying to cross over. Most don't expect this type of speeding up to occur when they're trying to legally cross over.
What I'm doing is probably considered reckless driving and still illegal, so I am going to stop doing it now.
But this is somehow an example, in my mind, where someone in authority thinks they are telling you [warning you] not to break the rules [that you didn't know you even broke initially] and then you subconsciously start attempting to make sure you get through a green light before the yellow light [the yellow light being the trigger you are now trying to avoid].
I think people in authority need to think out how they are going to or should apply their authority to others. Just because someone has authority and can micromanage everyone else to not break rules, doesn't mean they should think out how they should use their authority to stop all rule breaking including small rule breaking.
There is an old saying, which is "Because we had power, we thought we had wisdom."
One analogy: A teacher has authority to make students follow a lot of rules. However, the teacher should [in my opinion] treat all the students as the teacher would wanted to be treated, and not be an a-hole and make students uncomfortable by making them follow each rule and applying discipline to them each time they break each and every little rule. With the teacher analogy, no one is at risk of physical hurt like reckless driving; however, teachers do affect many many lives that are under their control. A teacher has a lot of mental power that works its way into the mentality of a lot of young minds and a teacher never knows how exponentially their actions can ripple through and beyond the moment [i.e. teacher does this, students think about it, student grows up and retells story to adults, then some adults that hear the story become very anti-teacher].
No one knows how and how far the rippling affect of their decisions will ripple on into the future.
Bookmarks