Tiny Town, USA – You have to work hard to get hit by a school bus. But someone managed to do it on Friday, March 5, in the late afternoon. We hope the injured party is okay, relatively. There was a blinding sun that afternoon, and it looks like the driver was headed west right into its piercing rays while making a left turn from Court to Tioga when a pedestrian manifested his/herself. This is all conjecture. As stated, you must be crazy or blind deaf and dumb or in some way peripherally-challenged to get in the way of a turning bus and we know this for a fact.
What was the most striking aspect of this accident, considering we arrived too late to stop it from happening, is that the kids had to stay on the bus for the better part of an hour while the EMTs and cops and school officials worked shit out.
In our day, that would have led to a riot. Those are the moments we yearned for as school children, the chance to kick open the emergency door and run off into ... who knows. Some kind of trouble.
But these kids were perfectly well behaved. Why? Further conjecture: Almost all of them were possessed of cell phones or some other electronic device and being held captive in a bus for an hour is really no different than being in a classroom all day. The only difference is that you can't -- or at least you are not supposed to -- text and chat with friends while in class.
A fresh bus, untainted by the human stain, arrived -- not that there was anything really wrong with the one that hit the pedestrian. But suddenly that bus was a bad bus and would have to be taken away to be punished.
As a side note: In official tests, school buses were the unanimous victors in situations where striking pedestrians was the goal. For the pedestrians, the sport has a 100 percent injury rate, rivaled only by that of players in the NFL and managers of Greenstar Coop.
More than this we do not know, because we are but witnesses in these worldly affairs, but there were some serious older men and women in civilian clothes standing around the scene who only appear, it seems, when school buses strike down pedestrians. What they do the rest of the time is yours to wonder.
Wow, It's something→: Just look at how orderly these kids are! Flanked by men in fedoras and long overcoats -- one wearing farmer's jeans (far left) ... One or two plain clothes detectives. Two IPD cops marking the spot where the bus came to rest (Rear wheel of bus on right). Other adults that are unidentifiable. All hell bent on making sure these kids, trapped in a confined space for an hour on a Friday, travel a straight line from the injured bus to the healthy bus. Now, either these kids were extremely bad children and had to be watched, or extremely good children in some advanced after-school program for rocket surgeons. Or they were regular kids mollified by technology, each armed with his/her own iPod, cell phone, etc., capable of zoning out of reality at a moment's notice and barely aware of their surroundings.
That, or we are witnessing something far more insidious: Teen baby-sitting gone awry inspired by Litigio-Terrorism!
To be fair to the supervising adults, the accident occurred in the midst of Tiny Town Lawyer's Ghetto. That this happened late in the day on a Friday was good luck for the school district. Most lawyers were off shaking martinis and sipping top shelf scotches.
We did not see anybody from Catalano and Alexander handing out cards. But where's Mark "The Hammer" Shapiro when you need him? If this were Syracuse, you can bet the scene would have had an edgier, grittier ambiance.
–– C. Penbroke Handy
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