It must be the end of the school year in suburbia, because local school bus drivers are getting kind of sloppy with their driving skills. How can this be possible you ask?Well, there are several examples, including; An All-Town bus driver whose license plate I couldn’t get (fortunately for him), made a right turn into the right lane, using a left-hand signal. Then were the two buses I saw racing with each other, zooming at 55 miles per hour in a 40 mph zone, heading north along McCormick Boulevard in Skokie.
Often times I wonder if they’ve hired the right people to drive children in school buses, but it’s not the first time I’ve wondered about that.
No, my wondering takes me back nearly 28 years ago to 1978, when I was a sophomore in high school at Niles West, in Skokie, Illinois.
I remember how fast buses used to travel as a teenager and that was when buses were unequipped with safety belts and god help us all when the bus driver had to make a sudden stop.
Imagine the chaos that would ensue. Bodies flying everywhere with injuries amuck, but there would have been no lawsuits for back then, times were far too gentler, there wasn’t that vengeful kind of motivation that so often interrupts our seemingly normal lives.
Back then, if some great tragedy occurred, the bus company would have accepted the responsibility suspended or fired the school bus driver in question and the local newspapers would scandalize it. End of story.
Somewhere along the line, anger grew up around it and realized a huge bale of hay could be made out of tragedies like this, so up sprang the era of the frivolous lawsuit, based on the zany choices that people made and the fun that ensued.
This is not to say that more serious accidents including permanent disabilities and fatalities do occur because they do, it’s just that this mentality of money more the motivator and not the principal of the idealism behind it, for when money talks, bullshit walks and it’s bound to go to people’s heads, all this money, for it leads to book and film deals, TV talk shows, magazine articles.
It’s called instant celebrity status and it’s ridden out until the rest of the world gets sick of it, especially people like me.
It was probably individuals like Gwen (one of the first African-Americans in my high school and who also rode on my bus); back on that school bus I used to ride home on during my sophomore and junior years of high school, who got the movement rolling, with her big mouth and griping to no end.
And that’s the way the movement began, thousands of voices all crying out for the same thing: “Give me something and give me something good or else!”
The “Or else” part is the one that got out of hand, a little too much. Yet back then, it was only the complaining and the griping was as satisfying as a teenage orgasm.
Or, as our bus driver drove over a large ridge in the road, causing a lot of us on my bus to be jarred and tossed around a little bit.
Gwen nonetheless, summed it up within a single sentence, leaving a stench in the early morning air as it occurred. Whenever Gwen had issues, she’d announce it to the world, whether we were ready to hear it or not.
“God damn it! You nearly gave me a heart attack!"
She should have begun the movement earlier and sued the lousy motherfucker!
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