Op-Ed: I’m an Incoming VCU Freshman and I’d Love to Tell You Why Jaywalking Is a Human Right

I wasn’t even going to sit down and write this because, let’s be honest, me writing anything is wild. I thought I was going to be done with writing when I graduated high school. Everything I have to say could be accomplished in a couple of snaps with some fire captions and a good filter, but my mom said this would look good on my resume, and she’s paying for everything, so here we are.

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Jaywalking is a human right, and it should be protected and allowed to happen freely and without penalty. It’s right up there with showing nipples on Insta, rolling a blunt before class, or being on my mom’s health insurance until I’m 30. 

It’s in the Constitution. Everyone is entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of being happy, or whatever, so why would you want to take away someone’s ability to walk right into traffic without even looking? If I want to risk death by rushing out in front of oncoming traffic, let me do what I want to do. 

I’m in college now. I’m an adult.

It’s like Travis and Cudi said, “Stop tryna be God. That’s just not your job.” I’ve never lived in a city, or had to walk anywhere up until this point, so I don’t really have a good grasp of traffic laws, but isn’t there some law that says that pedestrians have the right of way? I feel like we learned about that in Behind the Wheel. #flashbackfriday 

Sorry I don’t have time to pay attention to every single little light or sign while I’m in the middle of tweeting about how shit my life is. You can’t imagine the stress of trying to juggle my new course load on top of asking my mom to Cash App me $20 while stopping to take a dramatic yet wistful selfie in front of my dorm. It’s hard. 

The real tea is that I saw on Google that jaywalking was invented by the auto industry back in the day so people would think pedestrians were the bad guys instead of the assholes running people over in their old-timey cars. Oh, you want to cross the street, Albert? My Duesenberg thinks not!

Bottom line is, if I’ve got five minutes to walk from BoDillaz over to the engineering building, I am absolutely going to rush straight across Broad Street rather than going down to the crosswalk. I might even stand right in the middle of Grace until I decide if I want to cut across the park or go down to Belvidere. Not letting students jaywalk is a form of oppression and denies us the ability to live our best life by waiting until the absolute last minute to get to where we need to be. I have an inalienable right to take the most direct route from Point A to Point B. 

Who are you to beep at me? You don’t even go here, Karen. I’m not going to be late to class because you’re trying to get to work. 

Besides, think about it. Jaywalking students aren’t nearly as bad as those maniacs on bikes.  

Fuck bikes. 

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