“Now we got everybody zooming
The little kids zooming
Look like you got a hit Boosie (yeah)
Zoom zoom zoom zoom zoom zoom”
I saw these two guys on a scooter the other day and it was your typical “trapset” scooter along with the typical “trapset” scooter riders. How – you might ask – do typical “trapset” scooter riders look? Old slippers, long jeans pulled down to their thighs with no shirt; or short jeans with a raggedy shirt. And, no, Cam is not making fun of anyone’s situation. Cam is simply stating the usual attire of guys who ride the skeleton of a scooter. You know how bad “road tax” is to pay when you hit the pavement without a shirt on?
Sometimes, I feel as though these guys don’t fear death, or at least don’t consider it a possibility. And I know immediately associating death with the “trapset” scooters seems a bit hard and extreme; but if you’re weaving in and out of traffic doing a wheelie at high speed, you must have a low regard for life, toch?
I would expect that the guy who’s actually riding the bike is calm in that moment. He’s “in control” of the bike and he’s in control of his life. What I would expect is for the guy at the back of the bike to be a lot less comfortable and quite a bit uneasy; but that wasn’t the case, according to his face. He was completely calm and relaxed in his expression – and as you can imagine, I was left perplexed. (Expand that vocabulary y’all.) How is it that your life is in possible danger (so to speak) and totally in someone else’s hands and you’re so relaxed?
We live in a time where people are so for themselves; people are so “my life”; people are so “it’s my decision”; and people are so “I can do whatever I want because my decisions affect only me”. Now while I may look at the guy at the back of the scooter and feel that he is a complete idiot, someone else may look at him and say that he is expressing his “right” to “my life”; “it’s my decision” and “I can do whatever…”
However, as much as he may feel like he’s expressing his independence to do what he wants because it's his life and his decisions; I feel that he is also in that very moment proving the opposite. So while it was YOUR decision to get on the scooter; and it was YOUR decision to allow him to pop that wheelie with you; isn’t YOUR life now in HIS hands? Isn’t it HIS actions that now affect your life…that control your life basically? It seems like the independent choice only affirmed the interdependence.
As much as we make decisions that are “Pro-choice”, “Pro-me” and “Pro-independence”, if we would for a second just zoom out of that picture, we’d see that the stone we just dropped in the water had an outward ripple effect. What we’d also see is that the stones of others around us have outward ripple effects that are moving inwards towards us. I feel like every single decision is either reliant on another or affects another.
There are also “facts” that show that we were designed as humans to be interdependent and community-centred. And I get it. I get why we’re here. Hurt and vulnerability have caused us to zoom in and try to focus on ourselves only. If we could only be SELF-sufficient, we could “avoid so much pain”. But there is also self-sufficiency in interdependence, because we all have roles to play via our individuality. Absolutely rambling now... Moral: Zoom out.
So many layers...
*Cues Zoom by Lil Boosie ft. Yung Joc*
