Mrs. 99's Tirade

Mrs. 99 was frustrated. Out of the blue a few nights ago she started venting to Buck about the direction the world seems to be going in and what kind of place it will be for their children. Some of the things she said along the way made a lot of sense.

She started with the way car and truck drivers behave around bicyclists on the road. She and Buck both know someone who was recently hit by a car and run off the road while he was riding his bike. He was o.k., and accidents happen, but was it really an accident? Everyone has seen how pushy and impatient car drivers get around bicyclists, as though they are being horribly inconvenienced by having to slow down just long enough to carefully pass the rider. How dare the cyclist interfere with the driver’s speedy progress toward his or her critical goal? Buck has seen drivers intentionally speed up and move closer to the cyclist as an intimidation tactic, and heard many a driver sound their horns in anger. “Get off the road!”

It goes way past bicycles, though. Mrs. 99’s pet peeve is the way people don’t use their turn signals to communicate their intention to change lanes. “Well of course they don’t,” explained Buck. “That’s just an invitation to the other drivers to speed up so nobody will get in front of them.” Mrs. 99 acknowledged the truth of this remark. Sure, there are folks who will let you in when you signal, but the other kind seem more common.

So why is everyone in such a mad rush? What can be so important that people will cast aside simple civility and sometimes even the physical well-being of others in exchange for gaining a single car length in traffic? Are they really that eager to get to their cubicles?

Somehow the topic of school homework got weaved into the conversation. Second graders get tons of homework these days and it takes them until bedtime to complete it. Yet only twenty minutes of total recess time is allotted to them during the school day. The punishment for talking out of turn in the classroom is reduced recess time, so Mrs. 99 is left to wonder: when are kids supposed to burn off their excess energy? When are they supposed to be kids?

Buck didn’t interrupt the tirade to point out the obvious link to obesity. Mrs. 99 was on a roll.

The 99 children are kicking ass in school. In every subject, Uno has received perfect scores on every homework paper, quiz, and test so far (Dos is in kindergarten and doesn’t have quizzes yet, but the teacher has pulled Mrs. 99 aside and asked if the 99s were aware that Dos can already read and write, so all is well). Yet Uno can barely finish the homework! How challenging must it be for children who aren’t quite as far along as Uno is? Why is society working these children so hard?

Is it for better opportunities in the workplace? Mrs. 99 really hammered her point home, her tone voice escalating to an exasperated frenzy. “Are we pushing our children to these ridiculous extremes just so they can get better jobs than we have? You hate your job. It pays well, but you hate it. If Uno does better than you in school, will she get a job like yours except higher up the ladder where there’s even more stress? Will she be driving like a maniac, honking her horn at bicyclists, blowing people off the road, and cutting people off all so she can make it on time to meetings at a job she despises where she works seventy hours a week away from her family? How stressed out will her kids be when she and the system push them to be better than her?”

The situation was dire, but Buck knew what he had to do. Mrs. 99 needed to get laid, and he knew just the man for the job.