Today I watched a man in a wheelchair with only three wheels (it was missing one of the front casters) willingly and knowingly roll out into the middle of a crosswalk when the red hand on the crosswalk sign clearly indicated that it was not appropriate to be crossing the street, causing traffic in both directions to come to a complete stop on his account. I was terrified and powerless to do anything about it and thankfully all of the motor vehicle operators were able to avoid the guy who just went about his merry way.
The guy went on to roll himself up an unbelievably steep hill, several points at which I was thinking, "holy crap, I don't think he's going to keep going up..." But again, I was powerless to do anything because I was actually standing at the aforementioned crosswalk waiting for the red hand to turn into the white humanoid to allow me to cross the street. Fortunately he made it to somewhat of a landing partway up the hill where he could rest and in one of the most heartwarming scenes I've ever witnessed, another man came up to the guy and offered to push him the rest of the way up the hill.
I'm glad everything turned out ok for the guy but I found the whole ordeal had caused me a great deal of anxiety as my heart was racing and I had started to perspire as I was stuck at the crosswalk. I don't want to sound insensitive, but the whole time I was witnessing this I was thinking to myself, “Dude, I don’t know how you ended up in that wheelchair, but I could venture an educated guess.”
That’s all.
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