People sit in front of an open door and ask pitifully, “how do we exit? And when? When can we finally exit?”
Nobody is going to set you free. Nobody is going to return the freedoms that were taken away. The whole problem happened because people like you sat there waiting to be told what to do and where the exit is. Stop waiting and exit already. Because it’s only going to get worse until you do. (See preceding post).
When my dad was a youth, back in the late sixties, he did a fair bit of hitchhiking, most of it with a friend. One day, he and his friend had piled into the back of a pickup with their duffel bags on their way to… wherever. The driver had not made a great impression, but it was a shortish trip and nobody else was stopping. Near their destination, they started knocking on the cab window and indicating that this was their stop, and they were ready to get out. The driver turned around, leered at them, and sped up.
Dad and his hitching buddy never even discussed what came next. They waited for their chance, and when the truck slowed at a curve with a broad, grassy shoulder, they tossed their bags and jumped, figuring whatever the driver had in mind, it was probably worth a broken arm to avoid it. They didn’t break anything, and they lived to tell the tale (and many others just as wild).
Sometimes, the difference between a couple of bruises and a good story, and cops trying to identify your teeth on a pig farm, is knowing when to jump.
I’m not sure people from my generation down were ever allowed to take enough risks to know when it’s time to jump. We were the ones raised never to talk to strangersl We never learned how to do risk assessment. Now we think that jumping out of cars is so dangerous that we’re gonna go wherever that driver wants to take us, all the while telling ourselves that he didn’t mean to miss our stop, and clearly it was a mistake, and mommy and daddy will come make it right any minute now.
Excellent analogy.
LikeLike
A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
Leave a comment