Starting a movement.

Here’s a little something about me I’d like to tell you all… I, unabashedly, tap on cars in my crosswalk. If there is a little white man in a rectangle across the way telling me to go, and some distracted driver enters into my cross walk on a reckless attempt to turn right on red… oh, you better bet he’ll get a good tapping.
See, the way it works is this: you give two to three strong taps to the roof/trunk/hood, whichever is available, as if saying in a talking-to-dog voice “good boy, you are just such a good driver, yes you are!” It is important to continue walking across the road after the tap, as if nothing had occurred. It is not the job of the tapper to confront, only to snidely, and with as much passive aggression as possible, point out the drivers lack of awareness and ability to interact with the world of unsteel-clad mammalia, IE: pedestrians/cyclists.
I’ve been tapping for years, but an occurrence on E. Morrison the other day made me realize we, the tappers, are more numerous than I’d thought previously. I had waited nearly thirty seconds at the sidewalk for the ritual changing of hieroglyphs from red hand to white shadow. I stared across to four nondescript walkers, sharing the same wait, but from a different direction.
The changing of sigils happened, and I stepped into the path of a young woman turning right from the center lane as she attempted to beat the westbound traffic, now slowly lurching to life. Her hope of making it safely were dashed and she was left, beached and alone, diagonally slicing the white lines of my once safe world. So, in a movement of herculean bravado, almost as if compelled by some higher force to brave the digital martyrdom, my hand reached forth into the aether, and with the combined will and spirit of all my fallen comrades in the war for crosswalk equality, tapped three times upon this behemoth’s trunk… the echoes of which deafening the heavens themselves.
The group of four, now approaching westward into the fray saw my heroic actions and felt compelled to show adoration to their newly minted leader. The first of my new disciples was a woman nearly forty who said: “exactly”. Next, a man approaching seventy, with a grizzled coal miner’s voice, said, “good for you”. The third and fourth remained quiet, as if muted by the immensity of what they had just witnessed, a mystical form of post traumatic stress disorder. I smiled, coyly, and continued on like Jesus risen, having removed the boulder from the cave’s mouth; though the boulder blocking my Ascension took the form of a late 90’s civic.
So I walked away from the fading sunset and into memory, fully, finally, and completely, the tapper of cars. Fully, finally, and completely, a leader of men.

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