This morning, I had a close call, when a black female cop almost rear-ended me for going the posted 25 mph speed limit on a road that she typically monitors like a Nazi. Because, she was trying to multitask and was on her in-car computer (yeah, she was that close that I could tell what she was doing), probably running my plates looking for an excuse to pull me over since I was obviously obliging to the speed limit. And then she almost rear-ended me again when I actually came to a complete stop at the posted stop sign. My annoyance in the world rose again to where I remembered I was doing something this month.
What historic events led to African-Americans insisting on retrieving mail from their mailbox from within their cars?
I’m currently working a fairly normal 9-5 kind of job right now. So by the time I’m pulling into Zombieland, it’s around a time when many other residents are arriving home as well. Without fail, and with as much frequency as I am inconvenienced by at least one car insisting on backing into their driveways and sometimes garages, there will be at least one car I witness, every day, that is stopped adjacent to their mailbox, getting the mail, from inside their cars.
Sometimes, I can understand it; like if it were raining outside, it might not be a bad idea to minimize just how much rain you get on yourself, by getting it from the comfort of your own vehicle. In fact, that’s probably the only legitimate excuse I can think of to why someone would do that. Otherwise, I don’t get it. I don’t mind, and often like the feeling of a work day’s completion, capped off with getting out of my car after the conclusion of my commute, stretching out my legs, and taking the 15 seconds to walk down the driveway, leisurely check the mailbox and retrieve my allotment of bills, rip and toss the junk mail, and head into the house.
But otherwise, I cannot rationalize why a vast majority of people who live in my neighborhood that happens to be 96% black insists on retrieving their mail from within their cars. I think it kind of goes hand-in-hand with backing in their vehicles, because for those residents that have to turn left to get into their driveways, they conveniently put themselves into position for optimal backing in, by inconveniencing oncoming traffic, in order to feint into an optimal turning radius. But now, they’re stopping midway through their feint, facing oncoming traffic, when they completely stop in front of their mailboxes, and you see an arm reach and stretch, and dig the contents of their mailbox out. The biggest assholes sort through their mail right then and there, before completing the lengthy process of carefully backing their cars into the driveway.
I don’t get it. In the long run, it probably takes a lot more effort to get their mail from inside their vehicles than it would be to take the 10-15 seconds to walk down the driveway to the mailbox to retrieve. You have to be mindful of oncoming traffic, you don’t want to accidentally get so close you scrape your rear-view mirrors, or worse yet, scrape your rims on the curb and give them road rash. I thought it was done out of laziness, but upon musing about how much effort goes into such a procedure, now I’m left wondering why people would put so much effort into such a mundane task.
It also gives an anti-social message, to the people who camp in their vehicles, and then back directly into the garage, for those residents whose garages aren’t used as auxiliary hoarding dumps, and can house a vehicle. They avoid the minimal risk of god-forbid exposing themselves to a talkative neighbor, and scurry as quickly as possible into their domiciles.
So historically, I’m left to wonder what led to the evolution of this behavior? Camping in their cars gives me the impression of fear, or the seeking of shelter, or cover, from attack, gunfire. Maybe during the L.A. Riots, or when Detroit was the murder capital of the country, black people wanted to minimize how much they exposed themselves to drive-bys and gang wars, and did whatever they could from the safety of their own vehicles.
Maybe the advent of the drive-thru in fast food, and now pharmaceutical drug stores, as evolved today’s culture into believing that everything should be available to drive-thru with, to include their own mailboxes. Maybe in the end it’s not just black folk who exhibit this kind of behavior, but given the fact that I had never seen it until living where I do now kind of leads me to theorize that it is. Maybe the innate desire to separate themselves from the perceived expectation of society leads to this behavior. Maybe such rationale is what leads to the behavior of all these questions I’m asking.
So much for Moloch’s desire for equality when many are deliberately trying to separate themselves.
