As I walked to work, a police car turned up Ninth Avenue going the wrong way. Any time that happens, something bad is around the corner. Sure enough, police cars were emerging from everywhere. An ambulance was there with someone in it and blood was on the sidewalk – like someone had been stabbed. Some policemen were up the street looking for the criminal, others roping off the site, others in the ambulance. People gathered; some stayed, others looked and went on. Since my normal path was blocked, I crossed to the other side of the Avenue and kept walking. As I crossed intersections, I wanted to tell taxi drivers not to turn down that way, but I didn’t. "Too much advice," I thought. "They wouldn’t appreciate it."

I walked another ten minutes and finally heard the siren of the same ambulance. As it passed me, I wondered why it took so long – were they stabilizing the person, or getting information about the crime from him or her?

Nothing about the scene frightened me except the length of time the ambulance took. The fact that a crime had been committed on the sidewalk where I might have been walking was insignificant in my mind compared to the fact that once it had happened, life was in the hands of the institution.

As I analyzed it, I realized my institutional fear probably came from several sources – the helplessness of my mother in the nursing home she is in; Congress wasting huge amounts of the hard-earned money of the populace; the stories of "Titanic" and "Parade" on Broadway; and the incredible corporate inanimate bureaucracy we are all immersed in daily in the city. By second grade, I knew that school was only as good as the teacher, and that it was better to talk to a person than a machine.

But when I thought about the whole incident further, I also knew that once the patient got to the big hospital, the chances of recovery were far greater than if he or she were in the hands of a country doctor. What was it though, Thomas Jefferson said about eternal vigilance being the price of freedom? Freedom is eluding me more and more, and I simply must be less busy and more vigilant.