What’s worse is now our emergency sirens have been upgraded so they can even TALK to me when frightened public servants decide I need a 3AM wake-up call. I mean c’mon crash somebody else’s REM sleep party - I’m already hosting a platoon of voices in my vacuous skull full of burping Tupperware, so who needs yet another one? Never once in my life have I seen an effective air raid over my hut or worse, a free-range ‘one-too-many’ tipsy Godzilla tearing down my town.
Also now when skulking around the ‘burbs’, every cross-walk I encounter seems to bark some kind of warning chirp & chime. Some even squawk a doomsday countdown clock if I haven’t blazed across 100 feet of tarry roadbed in 3 seconds or less? Geez I don’t even think that Jamaican ‘BOLT’ guy can run that fast much less a dragging leisure-geezer like myself? Believe me I’ve been married a long time so I don’t need a shrill harpy ‘ice-pick in the ear canal’ reminder to know when it’s time to clear out of the way – my wife has been defending our refrigerator for years.
So hey if you are dumb enough to park your bike directly behind a trash truck or semi no amount of high pitched peep-beeping from a ‘back-up alarm’ is going to save you from yourself anyway. I just can’t imagine Daniel Boone, the ‘Abe-inator’, or even those poker playing dogs memorialized in felt, requiring so much ‘hand-holding’ in their era. Unlike today, those folks let the chips 'clink' to the floor as they may and understood, THAT was their one and only auditory warning. Sometimes it's not fair but the tenets of self-reliance, responsibility and yes, even the possibility of death are significant tests in real life. But compared to our current needy and feckless populace, our ancestors just seemed readily able to grasp and MEET their challenges with a little more gusto - and with A LOT LESS NOISE!
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