Trucks, speed, children and institutionalized moral cowardice.

Arranged in no particular order below are eight photos I snapped from a seat on the front porch, while smoking a cigar and drinking coffee, on Wednesday afternoon, September 24. The first four look left (east) on Spring Street, and the second four face to the right (west).

They don't do the scene justice, so I'll supplement them with background.

The rental properties across the street from our house (south side) currently house several small children, and in just a block and a half stretch on our (north) side, three new homeowners also have kids, albeit older than the ones in the rentals.

It's the most children we've glimpsed in this vicinity since moving here in 2003, and being kids, they're often out playing on the sidewalks -- and yes, there usually are adults nearby, so they're not entirely unsupervised.

The sequence below was taken in a couple of minutes. You can see a guy walking his dog, but not the children across the street on the east and west, who were out on the sidewalk just moments before the cavalcade of heavy trucks began speeding past, and to the east, during it.

I know this is tiresome, but hear it again: Truck traffic has exponentially increased, they should not be on this street in the first place, these trucks move very fast, we have lots of kids near the street, and while Mayor Jeff Gahan persists in advocating the demolition of buildings here and there on random public safety grounds, his perplexing refusal to acknowledge that escalated truck traffic, when entirely unregulated by ordinance enforcement or simple civic common sense, is just as much or more a threat to public safety is a red flag of epic dimensions.

Why is Jeff Gahan and his minions being so willfully blind to this?

Who are they serving, anyway?

Is Is it the citizenry, or Tiger Trucking?

These kids playing within yards of flashing steel, or J & J Pallet?

Why the silence, arrogance and refusal to acknowledge what their own eyes would reveal ... if they decided to climb out from behind the controlling stone wall, take the smallest look around, and actually see what's obvious to the rest of us?

We'll just wait a little bit longer for Jeff Speck's political cover, won't we? I suppose we'll have to, because we don't possess the collective cojones to take action before the Democratic Party is appeased.

Let's hope no one gets killed before it finally is proffered ... and that the prescription isn't ignored.