I asked my recently retired Department of Transportation friend how roads get widened. His answer was unsurprising: It happens because of increases in volume and planning for future traffic patterns.
I asked because it sounds unthinkable — not to mention being completely uncalled for — but iconic Fifth Avenue in New York City is rumored to be up for expansion.
How’s that even possible?
Steve Cothran
Fifth Avenue is one of the most well-known, highly trafficked thoroughfares in the world. Running primarily north to south, it’s landlocked on both sides by giants like St. Patrick’s Cathedral and Rockefeller Center, not to mention Saks and Gucci and Louis Vuitton.
Widening Fifth Avenue would destroy landmarks, make life infinitely more difficult (if not completely unlivable), and never could be cost-effective for those residents.
So it’s mind boggling to imagine one single New Yorker demanding the whole thing be redesigned because the lines on the pavement are too restrictive for his reckless driving habits.
The initial idea was floated 10 years ago. It rankled plenty, but far too many people laughed it off.
This proposal to completely upend our normal traffic patterns and the “rules of the road” felt even more repugnant because it was announced to a group who should’ve immediately recognized the warning signs, hit the brakes and exited the vehicle when someone said: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”
Candidate Donald Trump said this in 2016 to a group of evangelical Christians in Iowa. That outrageous statement should’ve been the last thing decent people ever heard from him.
Incredibly, however, his prophetic revelation was ignored by the white evangelical Christian voting bloc and they paved the way for him into the Oval Office. Twice.
And now we’ve seen the deadly accuracy of his prediction in Minneapolis. No matter who pulled the trigger, Renee Good was shot in the head — three times — because in 2016 someone imagined he could do just that, and we wouldn’t even bat an eye.
Wouldn’t such a public travesty spark a firestorm? Absolutely!
Renee Good
Unless, of course, those in power engineered the slow and deliberate erosion of truth, encouraging us to doubt verifiable facts we are witnessing with our own eyes:
- Hearing Renee’s final words, without a hint of malice, assuring the officer, “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.”
- Watching her turn the wheels away from the man who, against training, walks in front of her vehicle.
- Watching agent Ross clearly step around the front bumper to fire two more head shots, point blank, into her open window.
Before this young mother’s lifeless body was even at the morgue, the senseless slaughter was being spun by pundits who, like rejects from a Star Wars audition, were waving their hands in front of on-screen storm troopers and repeating unconvincingly: “These aren’t the murderers you’re looking for … .”
This agonizing crucifixion of the truth is on display frame-by-frame everywhere you look. Maybe that’s why federal prosecutors quit en masse to protest Trump officials’ ludicrous suggestion that they investigate Good’s widow instead of the shooting.
This travesty also was possible because they’d already begun widening the metaphorical lanes so far they’d spilled over into the waterways. Without even a search warrant, they have executed fishermen and “drug runners” whom they’ve promised us deserve to be blown up. Evidence is for suckers. Just look at that boat. Everybody knows what’s in them. (Puzzling how they recoil when that same argument is applied to the Epstein Files.)
But since they have failed to produce even a kilogram of evidence, we’ll just have to take their word. And Lord knows, politicians never lie.
So we’re widening for damage control because we’ve killed someone. We need to expand our boundaries to excuse our guilt, lest we’re up late at night like Lady Macbeth wringing our hands and pleading vainly, “Out damned spot! Out, I say!”
If we abolish the rules, we won’t have to obey the rules anymore. If we pave over the lines, we can go wherever we please and take whatever we want. Like Venezuela or Greenland.
Or maybe even you.
“Wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it” — Matthew 7:13-14
Steve Cothran is a native of Greenville, S.C., and holds degrees from Furman University, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Campbell Divinity School. He has served churches in Florida, North Carolina and Georgia, as well as six years in Kentucky where he and his wife, Nancy, were on the same staff together. He has written curriculum for Smyth & Helwys, CBF and d365, enjoys writing regular columns for the Newnan Times-Herald, and dreams of being the oldest cast member on Saturday Night Live.