On my motorcycle ride home today, something happened. And that something reminded me that every time I see a traffic light, I think of the uncaring selfishness of the human race.

I know that sounds like a stretch. After all, on the one hand, it’s an easy argument that traffic signals are one of the simplest and most elegant inventions ever. They’re so simple and elegant that even young children understand them, and despite being based on colors even color-blind people can read them. This color means this. That color means that. If you can’t see colors, they’re in a certain order. Everyone on the roads understands these rules—and in a perfect world they’d follow them. In that perfect world, traffic would move smoothly and everyone would be happy.

A perfect world indeed. We all know that isn’t how it works. There’s an old line that says “Red means stop; green means go; yellow means go very fast.” Untrue, but too many of us treat it like that. The yellow light really means to slow down, because a red light is imminent, but of course people routinely hit the gas and roar through anyway. Especially eye-rolling is the “glue guy”—you know, the guy who is clearly going to be running a red light, because the three cars in front of him are already speeding through the yellow, so he gets as close as he possibly dares to the bumper of the car in front of him. The light turns red and he’s still in the intersection, but it’s okay, because his front bumper is clearly magically glued to the rear bumper of the car he’s following. And in the intersection, annoyed motorists have to wait a bit longer until that scofflaw gets the hell out of the way.

That one scofflaw causes a domino effect. As he holds up the green-light traffic, those motorists get annoyed; had the first glue guy not held up their line, they might have made their own green light. But now they don’t, so when their light turns yellow, they in turn stomp their gas pedals, perhaps gluing themselves to the cars in front of them… and the cycle continues until that intersection is a hopeless mess and everyone is completely pissed off.

Uncaring and selfish. That’s what it is. But it’s even more basic than that.

I can remember first reading the driver’s instruction book back when I was in high school. There were a few things that are covered in the early pages of that book, as I’m sure they are in similar books in other states and countries. One of those covers what you’re supposed to do if a traffic light is not functioning or if it’s a four-way-stop intersection without a traffic light. In Maine, the process goes like this: Whoever arrives at the intersection first proceeds through the intersection; then, traffic takes turns counterclockwise around the intersection.

It sounds almost too simple to be true. If it’s that easy, then why the hell do we have traffic lights at all? If this sort of solution is in the first few pages of the basic driving manual, and it’s this easy to understand and do, why invest in all that lighting hardware? Why not just put up four-way stop signs all the way around and let us do what we’re supposed to have learned before we ever got behind the wheel of a car in the first place? After all, the proper use of directional signals is also in the opening pages of the driver’s manual, and everyone universally uses them properly wherever you go. Right?

Go ahead. I’ll let you stop laughing before I continue.

Of course, a lightless system would never work. Anyone who has ever been at a busy intersection when the traffic lights aren’t working knows that most people appear to either have no clue how to handle the situation or just don’t care (sadly, probably the latter). They barrel through the intersection—violating the right of way, cutting people off, and occasionally running into other cars in the process. This is why we have traffic lights—to attempt to impose some of that simple, elegant order to the chaos. It works, but only barely; people interpret those lights quite liberally.

Well, “liberal interpretation” is just polite-speak for “uncaring selfishness.” At our cores, that’s what we humans are all about—or, at the very least, we care more about ourselves than anyone else who might get in our way. We don’t care that the lights are telling us to slow down or stop. We have to be to work or the mall or the club or the daycare, and we don’t have time to do something as laughable as pay attention to traffic lights. We don’t care about working together as part of a civilized society when our own needs are far more important.

Well, of course we’re not interested in such silly laws; that’s why we have them. If people didn’t steal and assault and rape and murder, we wouldn’t need laws for violent crimes. If they were honest, we wouldn’t need books full of regulations for every profession and industry out there. And if we all shared in the spirit of societal cooperation, traffic signals would be unnecessary.

This is why traffic lights remind me of how uncaring and selfish humans are. I see them all the time; I drive through them day in and day out. Most of the time, I see people accelerate when the light turns yellow; often, I see them blow through red lights, absolutely ignoring everyone else.

Nobody’s innocent here. You’re not. You’ve done it. If you swear you never have, I’ll highly doubt you. And if you’re guilty, either you’re either uncaring and selfish or you’re incompetent or stupid. I think “incompetent or stupid” likely means you wouldn’t have a driver’s license in the first place, but stranger things have happened.

So that’s why I think of the uncaring selfishness of the human race when I see traffic lights. But way back in the opening paragraph of this rant, I said that something had just happened on my motorcycle ride home that had prompted me to write this. Care to take a guess?

Someone ran a red light in front of me? Glued through a yellow light? Rolled through a stop sign and cut me off?

No, nothing like that. Those things would give me the moral high ground. They’d justify this rant, so to speak.

The light turned green, but the four cars in front of me seemed to be conspiring to delay moving. By the time the first three were rolling through the intersection, the teenage girl in front of me was goofing off on her cell phone, and as the light turned yellow she realized she was about to miss her light. She hit the gas, squawked the tires, and tore ahead.

And I, on my motorcycle behind her, took off behind her. Glued to her bumper. The light was red before I was halfway through the intersection. I knew it was going to be. I did it anyway. I wasn’t even late for anything. I was just heading home. To make matters worse, I was just down the street from my house. Another cycle at the light wouldn’t have hurt this uncaring, selfish person. I’m probably the rarest person to pull that sort of shameful stunt, and the first to bitch about everyone else doing it.

But there I was. Uncaring. Selfish.

But that’s who we are. It’s human nature to think of our own wants and needs before anything else. It’s human nature to be a miserable bastard who ignores the law and demands that the rules must be different for him. That’s why we have traffic lights and all those other laws. And that’s why we all ignore them—whether you’re the kind of bastard like me who only does it once in a blue moon, or if you’re the kind of bastard who does it every time a traffic light doesn’t go your way.

The latter type is okay with being a miserable bastard, blaming it on human nature, and not giving a shit. The former isn’t.

I’m ashamed of myself. Disgusted, angry, and disappointed with myself.

But I’ll probably do it again.

It’s not cool to be a miserable bastard.

David M. Fitzpatrick is a fiction writer in Maine, USA. His many short stories have appeared in print magazines and anthologies around the world. He writes for a newspaper, writes fiction, edits anthologies, and teaches creative writing. Visit him at www.fitz42.net/writer to learn more.