In the meandering essay "Surviving Seattle’s sidewalks," the Seattle Times writer Susan Kelleher makes the bold claim that our city is departing from the golden age of the obedient pedestrian and entering the dark ages of "sidewalk rage." Her findings are supported by the research and theories of Leon James, a professor in psychology at the University of Hawaii. As the number of pedestrians grows, the kind of rage associated with the road increasingly erupts on the sidewalk.

James has a name for this new stage of rage: Pedestrian Aggressiveness Syndrome.

But for him, "mental venting" on sidewalks has more to do with smartphones than anything. He maintains that these devices have brought damage to the "morality of walking," and if the situation continues to get worse, pedestrians may, like drivers, have to get a license to use sidewalks. Kelleher adds to the professor's paradisiacal morality of walking the matter of moral decline. Instead of "'After you. No, after you,'" she writes "we [now] have 'Screw you!' as we encounter people who can’t see beyond their own electronics." South Lake Union is now plagued by "Amazombies," people "too glued to their own device to clear a path."

And what do we lose if we are not there in the moment? We fail to notice what the most famous urbanist of the 20th century, Jane Jacobs (another great moralizer), celebrated as sidewalk ballet. If while walking you are busy retweeting some funny comment concerning, say, Russel Wilson's new multimillion-dollar contract with the Seahawks, you will miss a "glimpse [of] love in its blooming stage," or seeing a "Real Change newspaper vendor boogie down," or hearing "dialects from around the world."

This business of privileging presence, which is as old as the hills, is just a lot of nonsense. Total presence only means one thing: You are very sick. Distraction is actually a sign of good health. Think about it for a minute: The frustrating thing about an illness is that it refuses to let you go and think of any other thing. It imprisons you in the worst of all places: the here and now. That's why time drags on and on when you have a pain in your head or belly or back. You know you are recovering only when you start to think of something else, when you begin to forget about the pain or fever. The more you are distracted, the better your health. Distance from illness is distance from the eternal now. How we got into a situation where being present is equated with being well is a total mystery to me.

This is why walking is so much better than driving, and maybe why smartphones are doing more harm than good to the car industry: You can get distracted while walking and not be a danger to others on the sidewalk. The same goes for those who use public transportation.

Those in cars, however, cannot do this. Drivers are forced to be exactly like the sick: as present as possible.