school crossing and raucous meditation

The boys are both having a bit of a tough time in school right now, which makes me sad so I have been on the lookout for things to lighten my mood. Here are two things that have struck me as vaguely hysterical.
There are signs all up over Benjy's school about school crossing safety (including one that says "Don't let your kids cross alone before they are 9 years old." I am 38 and I am scared to cross by myself here.) I can see why they have all the signs. Drivers are pretty crazy here, though they definitely respect the crosswalks more than back in Montreal. Anyway, there are kid crossing guards just like when I was in school. They wear bright yellow pinnies and because there are traffic islands, so two kids do each lane of traffic there seem to be twenty-five crossing guards at a crosswalk. I don't know if this just an Efrata-school thing or if it is being replicated all over the country. The kids who were crossing guards when I was a boy just had these little hand-held stop signs but the Israeli kids' stop signs are on broom handles that are longer than them like they are going to joust with them. The most striking thing, though, is that as part of their traffic control system they have obviously been taught before putting down their giant, long stop signs to give drivers the Israeli "wait a second" gesture which is made by putting the thumb, forefinger and middle finger together, facing up and waving the hand thus poised at the wrist. North Americans make fun of how infuriating that sign is (especially when when accompanied as is often the case by a a tooth sucking sound) but I believe that nobody can possibly like to be on the receiving end of this gesture of unsurpassed rudeness, and my guess is that it is probably responsible for nine out of ten homicides committed in Israel. Anyway the kids look very cute and silly doing it with such stagy earnestness. By the end of the year I am sure they will be doing it with the offhand, contemptuous flair that has driven so many people stark raving crazy.
Funny thing number two. I went to a Jewish meditation class tonight. I was early and was standing outside the building on Karen HaYesod street. The building next door is the national labour court building. There was a group of guys gathering around and it gradually swelled to a large throng of what I learned were dock workers from Haifa and Ashdod. While many of the guys looked like your average Israeli, there were enough hard nuts that it could have been mistaken for an open casting call for the Israeli version of the Sopranos. The port workers were angry about something that the Labour Minister had done or not done and were staging a very raucous demo. (When I say angry, I mean only officially. They were mostly smiling, chatting on cell-phones and happily milling about with occasional time-outs to scream angry slogans. I watched as a few guys very kindly made sure to help an old lady in a walker get through the packed crowd on the side-walk).
Anyway, the meditation was punctuated by the savage throated mob howling for the blood of the labour minister and the wailing of air horns. The person leading the meditation tried valliantly to incorporate the experience into his guiding - "sometimes we experience noise, or anger or aggression in our lives and we have to just be with the experience" or some anodyne therapy-speak to the point where I had to really bear down to avoid laughing and further contributing to the downhill slide.