About the paint

Those lines in the road weren't painted there for decoration...

When I see things like this, I have to wonder.

I mean, there are clearly marked lanes. And there's a clearly marked stop line. And there's a clearly marked crosswalk.

Why anyone would wait for a traffic light in the middle of a crosswalk, halfway into both lanes, is hard to explain.

There was nobody behind that truck when I came upon this cute little demonstration of... well... I really don't know what to call it. I mean, there was nobody that the driver of that pickup could've possibly been playing games with. Y'know... that type of obstructionist driving that some people get into when they don't want the guy behind them to have any possible chance of getting in front of them. That couldn't have been the reason, because the truck was all alone there at the intersection when I got there.

And they ended up going straight across the intersection when the light turned green, so it's not like they happened to have been in the left lane, but then realized at the last minute that they wanted to take a right (or vice-versa), but only made it halfway into the other lane before the light changed red.

I fully expected them to make a turn when the light changed. But they didn't. If they had, I probably wouldn't be writing this, now.

But I am writing this now. It's because I see things like this all day, every day. Little indications of decreased aptitude, intellect, and perception. Just a little tiny bit of erosion, year after year.

There was a theory, y'know... years ago, someone posited that the pollution would ever so slowly erode humanity's ability to reason. This would not be evident to anyone, but over the course of decades and generations, the level of intellect and reasoning ability would slowly decrease because of the long term effects of various pollutants going into the food chain and into the gene pool. The theory would predict that, over long periods of time, people would generally act crazier and crazier, but it wouldn't be noticed because everyone else was just as crazy.

Officially, pollutants are all about acceptable levels, of course...