Green Means Stop

The car rolled quietly to the white stripe running length-wise across the street. I never noticed it before but this time dad commented on it. He does that when he thinks he needs to teach us a lesson. "Be sure to stay a safe distance from the cross-walk," he says, as though he's a driving instructor. He forgets I'm only eight. "That's what this thick stripe of paint is for." I look at it. It's worn and beaten down. "The paint sure looks old, hey dad?" I call from the back seat. "I bet it's been a hundred years since it was first painted!" Dad chuckles. "Yeah. Either that or someone's been chipping away at it and painting it with rubber-tire-black colored paint," he calls over his shoulder with a grin. It's the "guard stripe." At least that's what dad calls it. When the light finally turns red and we continue driving, dad points out more things. "Notice that the red of the street light is the same red as the car's braking light?" I hadn't noticed that before either. Dad says it's so we all don't get confused when driving. Too many colors, he says. I ask him why the colors mean what they do. Why does green mean "stop" and red mean "go"?
"Well, I don't have scientific evidence to back it up but..." "That's never stopped you," mom interrupts. We all laugh, including dad. "I think the colors mean something mentally. Just look at the color green. We see it and we have the natural urge to stop. What do you do when you see a piece of moldy cheese or boogies? You stop!" "You're gross, dad!" I say while scrunching up my face. "But now take the color red. You see it and you want to go. What did you do last summer when you bumped into the new fence post? You got a bleeding nose. The color red made you run, didn't it? See? It's mental." "Speaking of mental..." mom says, intentionally letting her voice trail off. "I heard." Mom's "I" is loud and pronounced. She stops speaking and looks at us, letting her two words serve as a vocal way of putting her foot down. When she had our attention mom continued. "I heard that it wasn't always like that. I heard that years and years ago green used to mean 'go' and red used to mean 'stop.'" Now we're all looking at her. Just then we stop at another green light. "Take this intersection for instance. People would have kept driving right through the green light." Now she looks at dad, "Instead of stopping too quickly like dad just did." Dad smiles and shakes his head. "Let's pretend that this light makes us wait for one minute." "I hate lights," dad says. Mom ignores him and keeps talking because he always says that at intersections. "We're stopping for one minute at our red light while the other traffic is going for one minute for their green light. You all following me?" We nod. "But what if those people, when the light turned red didn't stop. What if those people ran their red light for an extra few seconds? Our light is green, which means go, but we can't because people are still driving through the intersection. It's unfair because they got more than one minute to go but we had to stop for more than one minute. Still following?" We all nod again as dad proceeds through the red light. "Once all the cars finished running their red light, our traffic only had, not sixty seconds but only forty-five seconds to make it through. So, to make up for that time our traffic now ran the next red light for 15 seconds to make up for lost time." We're all trying to picture what she was saying. "It kept going like that. Every line of traffic would run the red light because they had to wait at their green light while the other traffic ran their red light. On and on this went. The time got longer and longer that people were running the red light until people were no longer stopping for red and going for green," mom slowed down her speech now, "they were going for red and stopping for green." Mom lets her last sentence sink in as we pull up and stop at another green light. "Run it dad!" I call out from the back seat. Dad mulls the logic of mom's story over. "Stop at red and go at green. That's crazy!!"