Life Speeds On as the Traffic Lights Change

Re “For Energy Savings, Watch Traffic Light,” June 10:

Few things remain constant over time, but until recently one of those rare things was the color of traffic lights.

Now, according to your story, they are replacing the “old-fashioned” bulbs with energy-efficient ones that produce slightly different colors. To my eyes, the new “green” looks more bluish than the old one did.

Interestingly, they will not be changing the color of the third traffic light, yellow, which used to mean “caution.” Now when people see that light, they seem to think it means “speed up,” which I suppose is symbolic of our lives these days. While we used to see change as a warning to slow down, now we see it as a reason to move even faster.

We should be cautious about fiddling with symbols which have seeped into our collective unconsciousness, however. For these days, with the speedup in the economy and the loss of stability in our homes, those symbols may be the only things which provide us something to measure our lives by.

Traffic lights provide a color scale against which all the other colors of life can be compared. Now that they have been changed, will the sky look just as blue? Will grass look the same shade of green? And, most important, will we constantly be reminded while driving that nothing is permanent, that all things must change?

Richard Showstack

Newport Beach