ALT-1 Road Rage
Ever have one of those moments that can be described as an epiphany, a light just went off, and you suddenly understood something? I don't remember the exact age when I got sick and tired of raising my own blood pressure over some other idiot on the road, but I think I was around 29. I remember telling myself, " ya' know what, I have to experience this person's bad driving for about 2 seconds of my life, they have to live with themselves forever". Now I don't know if the culmination of my coming of age as a soon to be 30 year old, or if I truly had the aforementioned epiphany, but whatever it was cured me of any further one finger salutes for the most part. Now and again, in dire need of anger release, I have shown the worst of me, but as I said, for the most part.
All joking aside, as I get older and wiser, I have figured out how to avoid the bad drivers and appease the angry ones at the same time. It's easy to figure out the angry driver on the road because I used to be one, so it's a street smart thing. Just as thugs know thugs, so goes road ragers know the habits of same. Armed with the knowledge that the angry driver wants to be respected, I can provide that and disarm a situation. If you accidentally cut someone off, give them a wave of acknowledgement and a smile and they'll feel like the horses butt if they felt anger toward you. But of course, a former rager would never cut anyone off because we are the best drivers in the world and everyone else are the idiots, right? That's the other lesson, no matter how we hard we try to be a perfect driver, someone else will be exceeding the speed limit by 30MPH and you still can't win no matter what.
Because driving is not a human instinct inborn to us, as we drive along in our shells of metal we sometimes can feel disconnected, almost chat room like in our attitudes. In the case of driving, our cars have become extensions of ourselves. Sociology would tell us that we have a certain bubble, or distance in which we feel comfortable when it comes to interpersonal contact. The same may hold true with the extension of ourselves in the form or cars, and when someone violates that space we feel insulted. When standing in the grocery store we would not gracefully accept someone butting in front of us by telling us they are about to a few seconds earlier. Therefore, why do people feel that it's okay to change lanes into our front fender by using a blinker?
These are the reasons that people road rage, some of which is because people drive differently than they would otherwise interact in person. To understand why road rage happens is the first step to preventing it. Whether it's you or the other person on the wild tangent, if both people have a better understanding of what happens when a person gets behind a 4000 pound hunk of metal we can end the anger, or most of it.
