Traffic lights teach us to go with the flow

My family will tell you I hate stopping at red lights.

That does not mean I run them. I let that be the property of the drunken drivers, speeders and fire trucks with flashing lights.

It is the asynchrony that I detest. Trying to get to work or home the results are the same. Every few feet it seems there is another stoplight glaringly red.

If not the next light, it is the one after that makes the inevitable change from yellow to red.

It is like the system is built to mock the commuter. No matter if one goes the speed limit, below it or above it, there is no reason to the rhyme, no roll to the rock.

This article should be about signal light synchronization and the waste of expensive gasoline, the exhaust of deadly fumes and the growing frustration of the whole driving public.

It is not. It is how to endure the wait.

The laws of nature govern the Earth and its occupants. These rules are open to discovery but not change. In spite of the clock-like rising and setting of the sun, there are so many other things that can only be answered by chance.

I don't dismiss divine intervention, but since predicting His actions has proved of late to be a bit difficult for the self-proclaimed adventist, I will leave that form of explanation of events to someone else.

Randomness appears all around us. There are the lotteries or the more tragic stray bullet.

Some years ago a large boulder came crashing down a hillside, falling on top of a moving tour bus. The sad result was that several passengers were killed. Not all. Just some. Not the ones seated next to the victims.

As one looks out on the devastation of recent tornado winds and sees the one house standing and others non-existent, there is the same question of why, how and what if.

Soldiers return from combat with similar stories of near misses or near hits. They describe how a minute before they were sitting where a mortar round blew up.

Within our own lives far from the battlefields we have tales of could have beens or what ifs.

This is where the traffic lights now come back with their wonderful red glare.

What if the light would have been green and the traffic continued on? Up ahead a deaf child is signing to her parents that she wants to cross the street to play with her friend, Olive.