Year 12 English - Column Writing
By Thomas Smith | Posted: Wednesday August 23, 2017
A disease has fallen upon our planet. A pestilence that provokes my impatience. A widely known, little thought of phenomenon that grinds my gears. Slow walkers. They’re out there. Traipsing and meandering without a care in the world.
No time to respect the wishes of a quick yet acceptable worker such as myself, but plenty of time to amble around the middle of walkways, gazing and gawping at whatever pointless pleasantries pique the brain of the small-minded. All while ignoring the cries and anguishes of hardworking men and women who want nothing but for the public to just pick up the pace. I’d say these slow walkers aren’t messing around, but the fact is that is all they are doing. I’m a guy with quick feet and places to be and I’ve had enough.
I’m a young man. I honestly can’t say I’ve got a car to drive and I can’t say I’d have the license to drive it. This means, in my pursuits of the terrain and city I’m on foot. I understand I’m not the only one like this. There is certainly an abundance of cars on the road and an abundance of drivers within those cars, who at that moment in time are not concerned with the speed of your average walker.
But the moment you exit your vehicle, the moment your foot touches the ground and you close your car door, leaving the protective carapace of modern engineering behind you, you’re in the wilds. You’re down here with the rest of us and let me tell you it’s a jungle out here. Predators stalk the paths. Breathing fire and disappearing in a puff of smoke. The worst of these beasts is the slow walker. Loping along with reckless, childish abandon.
Sickening.
They’re a plague. An unshakeable migraine battling all logic and sense. Speeding along I watch them fade by. Like a knife I cut through them. I leave them in the dust, my heels their only memory of me. I see them strolling ahead of me. What do I do? How do I deal with these vermin? I turn up my nose and I hike. I show them who owns these streets and I show them what it means to walk.
Of course, I understand this epidemic. At least, on a purely fundamental level. Co-ordination of the ankles, knees, hips, waist and elbows is not a gift everyone has been bestowed with nor is it a skill that many have the competency to learn. It is a finely tuned art and I am a painter. Each stride is a stroke of my brush and each block I conquer is the masterpiece I leave behind.
The inadequacy of one’s physical performance is something I can understand but I will tolerant no flaw of the brain that prevents someone from moving over. I will also take no part in the recently surged, inappropriate as it is popular, social revolution that is “sympathy”. What sounds like a permit for ignorance is something I will have nothing to do with.
It is the primary duty of society to preserve and cultivate brain cells and this barbaric act of dallying that I see daily presents absolutely no benefit to me. I implore those that tarnish hallways, footpaths and doorways everywhere to make room for the higher members of the walking society. Know your place or find a new one.
