Reckless (adj.)

"ttyymmnn" (ttyymmnn) 05/24/2018 at 10:51 • Filed to: None

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I spent a few minutes reading some of the comments over on Jalopnik from the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! about a young mother who was killed by a pair of street racers. Her baby, who she was pushing in a stroller, was critically injured. The comments go about as you might expect, but I have a thought that I’d like to share with a more thoughtful group of people.

The very first comment questions why the mother was walking with her baby near a busy street. I’m not going to go into any discussion about whether this comment was victim blaming or simply rhetorical (though I do have an opinion on that). Others said things along the lines of, “Well, if she were jaywalking” —which she wasn’t — “then she deserves part of the blame.” Okay, I suppose that’s arguable. But let me ask a rhetorical question of my own: If you are driving down the street, and you see somebody jaywalking, do you say, “They’re jaywalking. Screw ‘em,” and then run them over?

No. You, as a functioning member of society with a modicum of concern for a fellow human being, stop. Or at least slow down. You might honk, or shake a fist (or a finger). You might even try to get as close as you can to them without hitting them. But you don’t simply mow them down because you have the right of way.

That’s because you have reck . You are not reckless . And indeed, the drivers and passenger in this tragedy were all charged with, among other things, reckless driving resulting in serious bodily injury. But what does “reckless” really mean? Let’s take a look at the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! of the word.

Reckless (adj.) Old English receleas “careless, thoughtless, heedless,” earlier reccileas, from *rece, recce “care, heed,” from reccan “to care” (see reck (v.)) + -less. The same affixed form is in German ruchlos, Dutch roekeloos “wicked.” Root verb reck (Old English reccan) is passing into obscurity.

Reckless is a very old word. You can find it as far back as Shakespeare,

So flies the reckless shepherd from the wolf;
So first the harmless sheep doth yield his fleece
And next his throat unto the butcher’s knife. (Hamlet)

Here, the shepherd cares not for the sheep, and would rather save himself than tend to his charges, who cannot protect themselves.

So, reckless driving doesn’t mean just being crazy behind the wheel. It means being careless, thoughtless, heedless of others , of humanity. Without !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! . So, it doesn’t matter one fig whether that young mother was jaywalking or not. It doesn’t matter if she chose to walk her baby near a busy road. The young men who killed her cared not at all for the lives of anybody other than themselves.

Ash78, voting early and often > ttyymmnn 05/24/2018 at 10:58

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On a very basic human level, being in command of a 4,000 piece of steel requires a degree of situational awareness due to the potential danger. Far more, I would argue, than being a cyclist or pedestrian (though both should exercise caution).

The bottom line IMO is that she could have crossed at that intersection with normal traffic 1,000 times without incident. However, the street racing is the key precipitating factor here. Jaywalking? I’ve never heard of that holding up in wrongful death, except maybe if she jumped into traffic out of nowhere. This area had good sightlines and speed limits exist for a reason, even if they err on the side of being overly cautious.

jimz > ttyymmnn 05/24/2018 at 11:00

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I honestly think (hope) those people are arguing simply because their egos compel them to say something.  

crowmolly > ttyymmnn 05/24/2018 at 11:00

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The very first comment questions why the mother was walking with her baby near a busy street.

They can fuck right off with that. This woman was not walking her kid alongside a major interstate. 

Thousands, (maybe millions?) of people around the world walk their kids around “busy” streets. There is a sidewalk there, designed to be walked on.

ttyymmnn > Ash78, voting early and often 05/24/2018 at 11:01

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It’s like what I say so often to my boys. They throw something and brake something. “But I didn’t mean to hit it.” Of course you didn’t. But if you hadn’t thrown it in the first place, nothing bad would have happened. I’m certain those guys didn’t wake up in the morning and say, “Let’s go kill somebody today.” But if you take the racing out of the equation, that lady and her baby are still alive.

ttyymmnn > jimz 05/24/2018 at 11:03

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Good point. It is often the wisest man who, when he has something to say, chooses to say nothing.

TorqueToYield > ttyymmnn 05/24/2018 at 11:03

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1. she wasn’t jaywalking, she was crossing the street legally.

2. many long time city dwellers know it’s safer to cross some streets mid block vs at the intersection since you only have to look out for traffic from 2 directions not 8 directions - jaywalking be damned.

3. I doubt the street racers meant to hit her or had any conscious thought about her being there other than ‘holy shit’. Speeding is/can be dangerous because you overdrive your sight lines and stopping distances. Also people in general have really bad speed perception, so if you’re crossing the street it’s extremely difficult to tell if the oncoming car is doing 40 or 60 or 80 or 100, all you see is a car coming, it’s easy to assume you’ll have plenty of time to cross because you cross that same street all the time and given a car doing the ‘normal’ speed for the road you know you can make it.

Finally - I’ve found many people in the US just have never walked anywhere on a regular basis, especially in a somewhat busy city and are just clueless.

OPPOsaurus WRX > ttyymmnn 05/24/2018 at 11:07

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man that first comment....

ttyymmnn > TorqueToYield 05/24/2018 at 11:07

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Also people in general have really bad speed perception

I think this played a large part in this. There are other factors we’ll never know since the mother is dead. Bottom line, if we drive around without a care for anything but ourselves, people will die. It’s a choice. Sometimes, we are, in fact, our brother’s keeper.

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > ttyymmnn 05/24/2018 at 11:08

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See also reckoning.

As regards “victim blaming”, it is fundamental to the function of society to be able to isolate victim behavior from the acts of the offender. It’s usually a mistake to share *guilt*, surely, but sharing guilt isn’t necessarily the same thing as sharing responsibility or specificity. It’s not the specific active fault of someone leaving a car unlocked in the hood that *a* car was then robbed, it is potentially a fault in their responsibility that it happened to them *specifically*. Something that in no way reduces their need for remedy or the penalty applied to the offender, merely reducing the surprise and affecting the answer to the question “why did this happen to me?”

The answer is, you may have made a bad decision. Not correct to blame you for it having happened, possibly appropriate to blame you for it happening to you. A critical ability for distinction that I reject any attempt to remove from me. Because it’s correct, and no call to shame me for alleged victim shaming will obliterate that.

Obviously, anyone attempting to distribute guilt is in this framework also wrong.

crowmolly > Ash78, voting early and often 05/24/2018 at 11:09

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Might not have been jaywalking. It’s kind of murky, but “unmarked crosswalks” are a thing, and the curb cut seems to support that theory.

ttyymmnn > OPPOsaurus WRX 05/24/2018 at 11:10

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That’s what set me down this road.

WilliamsSW > ttyymmnn 05/24/2018 at 11:12

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I think that, sometimes, people have a knee jerk reaction to somehow shift some blame onto the victim, as a defense mechanism- “that would never happen to me, because I wouldn’t cross there”.

It’s blatantly false, because from the source article, it certainly seems as though the poor woman did absolutely nothing wrong (unless you want to blame her for not accounting for traffic oncoming at double the speed limit).

I Like Cars (and plenty of others) would have done well to read the source article and/or just shut the fuck up.

ttyymmnn > WilliamsSW 05/24/2018 at 11:14

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As I said to somebody else in this discussion: It is often the wisest man who, when he has something to say, chooses to say nothing.

nermal > ttyymmnn 05/24/2018 at 11:21

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I think complete victim blaming in this scenario would only apply if the drivers were driving responsibly, and the woman was totally tripping balls. It is also possible to be a pedestrian dangerously, such as walking on the side of an interstate too close to the road (or even in the road).

It hasn’t been confirmed the woman’s mental / intoxication state, but surely that will be investigated.

As presented, this seems pretty clear. Two DANGEROUS YOUTHS were street racing, and took out a woman pushing a stroller. It is the responsibility of the driver to not hit pedestrians, even if the pedestrians are doing dumb stuff. It’s at the same time reasonable for pedestrians to not do dumb stuff, like walking in front of two dangerous youths that are street racing.

Future next gen S2000 owner > ttyymmnn 05/24/2018 at 11:28

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I’ll add a bit of specific tangential information. When charged with reckless driving, you have to intentional do something. When you are charged with careless driving, you don’t intentionally do something. If you start smoking the tires while trying to get ahead of someone, that is careless. If you lay a mile long black patch after a light, that is reckless.

At least that’s how the officer explained my ticket to me and why I was lucky I wasn’t being given a reckless driving ticket.

It was in Michigan, but I would think it would be similar in other states.

ttyymmnn > Future next gen S2000 owner 05/24/2018 at 11:30

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I think those are specifics that go towards punishment. For example, in VA, up to 20 over the limit was speeding, 21+ was reckless. They can write a bigger ticket for reckless. My discussion was not so much about the legal semantics as just what the word means and how it applies to this situation. If the woman had simply walked out into traffic, then she would have been reckless. But she didn’t.

Future next gen S2000 owner > ttyymmnn 05/24/2018 at 11:32

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I think this stems from an expectation of speed. It’s one thing to know most people speed. When you cross a road, your mind factors in typical acceleration, distance, speed limit, and past experiences when deciding if you should cross. Change any one of those variables significantly and people get caught off guard.

I’m caught many people jay walking with my motorcycle. It easily accelerates at twice the typical rate from a stoplight.

I’m not saying she was at fault but she probably thought she had more time than she did due to past experience. She assumed the cars were coming at a normal speed.

Chuckles > ttyymmnn 05/24/2018 at 11:32

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I regret reading so many of those comments. So many people seemed hung up on whether or not she was Jaywalking, as if it’s fine to run over people who choose not to use a crosswalk. Unless she jumped out in front of traffic, the drivers had an obligation to avoid hitting her. It doesn’t matter where she was crossing. I’m sure people cross there every day and survive.

ttyymmnn > Future next gen S2000 owner 05/24/2018 at 11:45

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Have you ever tried to cross an interstate? I have, and it’s terrifying. Cars coming at 70 mph are on top of you in an instant. If your only frame of reference is crossing the average city street, then you will die. As you suggest, she may well have seen the cars but had no idea that they were coming at her at twice the speed limit.

Future next gen S2000 owner > ttyymmnn 05/24/2018 at 12:01

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I know. Just wanted to share another aspect of the word.

e36Jeff now drives a ZHP > ttyymmnn 05/24/2018 at 12:22

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The one issue I have when things like this pop up is it always seems like a vast majority feels the blame is entirely on a single person. The reality is that it is extremely uncommon that only a single person is 100% to blame for an accident. I’m not going to say the guys street racing aren’t at fault, or that their actions were the primary contributor to this tragic incident, they very clearly are. But some of the fault *could* lie with the mother if, say, she was crossing when it was counter-indicated by a walk/don’t walk sign. Obviously the cars should have still stopped, but crossing when the traffic was not being stopped by a traffic light(or some other traffic control device) would put some of the blame on her.

Now, I don’t know if that happened. And by all accounts it sounds like this might be one of those cases where one party to an accident is truly blameless. But too many people instantly absolve the victim of an accident(or in some cases a crime) of any level culpability and will vehemently attack anyone that says otherwise.

ttyymmnn > e36Jeff now drives a ZHP 05/24/2018 at 12:57

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If you dig into the comments, you’ll see pictures of where the crash occurred. There are no painted crosswalks, and no lights, but there are pedestrian ramps that clearly indicate it as a place to cross the street. Police had said that she was crossing legally. I understand and appreciate everything you are saying, but if you take the racing out of the equation, this mother is still alive.

DipodomysDeserti > ttyymmnn 05/24/2018 at 13:45

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Great post. The word of the day is empathy.

I live in Phoenix, Arizona. It routinely reaches 110F here, with temps on the street reaching well above that. We are not a pedestrian friendly city. If I see someone walking and they do something unsafe, I cut them some slack, give them some room, slow down, watch out for them... No fucking way would I want to be in their shoes, walking around in insane heat, so I try to make their day at least a little better by helping them out. Life is way too fucking short to be an asshole to people while driving.

I saw the same attitude you’re referring to when that lady was run over by the autonomous Uber. Yeah, let’s shit on the homeless person who has to live on the street in a place where the weather will kill you...

ttyymmnn > DipodomysDeserti 05/24/2018 at 13:54

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Thanks. The world would be a much better place if folks gave up 5 seconds of their busy day to cut somebody else some slack. God forbid you’d have to walk a mile in their shoes.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > DipodomysDeserti 04/27/2020 at 20:13

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This is an old post. But last night during an episode of Poldark  on Amazon, one of the gentry said of one of the peasantry in Cornwall, “If they cannot feed, they should not breed.”