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When living in Mexico City for the first time saw a man walking on the sidewalk carrying a small white Coffin on his shoulder followed by a woman holding a small bouquet of flowers in her hands.
I was in a car with a Mexican friend and asked him what they were doing......his answer was "a FUNERAL".
Ironically car culture people cant grasp that they themselves make the problems they complain about. I don't think the people that put threads like this up, will ever get it though . . .
It would seem to me that if anyone thinks "the world revolves around them" it would be those who think that others who didn't know the deceased from Adam should be guilt-tripped into pulling over out of "respect" or that their caravan should tie up the entire area's traffic, all over one person whom 95% of the people didn't even know.
No, it's a thing of that when it's someone who is that big of a name, think Bill Clinton in Arkansas or George Bush in Crawford TX, then you can make exceptions for such special cases even if you still don't agree with the practice in general. You still disagree with the overall practice, even in those cases, but just as with many other aspects of life, sometimes you make an exception for special cases (or you simply accept them).
But if I'm already in front and I'm going faster (which usually is the case), then what harm am I doing? I'm not in anyone's "way" in the least. That I would just carry on as I was is of no consequence to anybody. That I've seen people pull over even when it was a 4-lane road with a huge "buffer zone" between the 2 separate lanes and they were on the other side, that says to me it's about reverence.
In the case of emergency vehicles (a) typically they're going faster than you and (b) someone living or dying is at stake. The only thing at stake in a procession are people's feelings.
Like I said, if I want to show "compassion," I can always attend the actual funeral, heck I would calculate that to be far MORE compassionate. On the roads, I'm not about compassion, I'm about quickness and efficiency. Funeral processions can very often cause traffic jams that lead to far more than 2 minutes of trouble, and regardless, even if it's "only" two minutes, so what. That's MY business as to why my time is that important, I don't have to rationalize it to anybody. To me, convenience is EVERYTHING and I mean EVERYTHING, my time is EVERYTHING. If that means someone else CHOOSES to be "offended" because I didn't pull over out of reverence, tough. On the road, I could honestly care less.
Again it's not about you. Or your convenience. A lot of states have traffic laws give funeral processions a right of way in some regards. like blocking traffic at red lights to give the procession right of way. In some cases the law states regular traffic must yield to funeral procession. And that may mean pull over. So it may have nothing to do with reverence. It's just the law.
I have no idea of your age OP, but it sounds like you're young. You would have really felt tortured back in the day when driver's had to sit & wait for the train to go by...several times a day. Lol! As a child, I would pass the time by counting the railroad cars. Many times there were well over 100 cars.
It gets quite hot here in AZ and I was stuck in a car with no A/C for almost a half hour for a funeral procession. A woman in front of me was out walking her baby as we could not go anywhere. I thought that was quite cruel and I felt sick from the heat. I had just moved here and wasn't used to the heat or have A/C in the cars.
I have no idea of your age OP, but it sounds like you're young. You would have really felt tortured back in the day when driver's had to sit & wait for the train to go by...several times a day. Lol! As a child, I would pass the time by counting the railroad cars. Many times there were well over 100 cars.
We still have that here on a road near where I live! Freight trains run about once an hour, so depending when you are traveling on that certain road, you will have to wait. What I do is either put the car in Park (in winter), or shut off the engine (if the weather is nice) and count cars. The trains often have over 100 cars. It carries everything from oil from North Dakota to coal to fertilizer to corn to who knows what. It's fun to try to speculate! The train is not going very fast, either, so if you get there as the crossing arms are just going down, you can expect to sit and wait 10-15 minutes. At night, if I listen closely, I can sometimes hear the train whistle. I think it's kind of pretty!
The best solution for funerals might be to pass a law requiring them to use buses instead of cars. Or maybe we could pass a law requiring them to freeze the corpse until a particular day of the year, and that would be the one day of the year people could have funerals. The news would say "today is funeral day, you are advised to stay home. If you don't take this advice, it's your funeral."
Funeral processions are legal. You know like the laws you keep quoting when you take pictures of children you don't know. You get upset about the last time a person will ever be the cause of a traffic delay but will argue all day about your rights to take pictures of strange children. I am sure more people are annoyed with you taking pictures all of the time than by being delayed for a minute or two for a funeral procession.
We do occasionally get in each other's way don't we?
Only the greatest sense of humor could have made life such that everyone is given the opportunity to irritate someone else by dying.
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