What the white crosses by the street in Phoenix mean


If you've driven around Phoenix, Arizona, you've seen the white crosses. And they're what you think they are - markers, like over a grave. But don't worry, no one is buried underneath them. They mark the place where someone died in an automobile accident.

As an average white guy growing up in Minneapolis, my attitude towards the dead has been that once someone is gone, they're gone. In my culture, we hardly ever speak of the dead, dead people are only "creepy things" during Halloween, having pictures of dead family members is seen as "not getting over it", and death is mostly ignored.

So if you're kinda creeped out by the white crosses, and also by the "in memorandum" written on the backs of windows of vehicles in Phoenix sometimes, I understand. If this is part of your culture, you may wonder why people object to this. I'll see if I can explain.

When I moved to Phoenix I discovered a world of connected families. Brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles, etc. I remember one of my best friends walking me down a street in his neighborhood pointing out all of the houses where his family lived. And then I discovered something even more shocking to me - that family remained family even after death.

I've been exploring Phoenix on foot a lot the past couple of months, during the nice weather. I've ridden on the bus, I've been on the Light Rail. I've seen a lot of people, the way that you don't see them if you're always inside of a car. I haven't done much walking for years (I'm usually sitting at my computer or inside of a car) and it's fascinating to walk with these people. And when you see one of the white crosses by the road, you walk with the dead.

If you walk in fear of the living, and the dead, take a moment to look more closely at the crosses. There's a connection there of friends and family, of brotherhood and sisterhood. The type of connection that transcends all barriers, social, economic, ethnic, and cultural. And transcends all understanding.

Go in peace.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is ...
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the...
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me...
Read more