Road Rage

Nothing in this world captures the hypocrisy and self-absorption that classifies mankind as road rage. The competitive nature that has driven our species forward, ensuring that we stayed fed through the lean years, and clothed through the cold ones, is still alive and well. Let’s face it; everyone who is on the planet right now is here because all of his ancestors—humans, monkeys, four-legged fish, amoebas, whatever—were pretty damn good at survival. That pressing need to go after a precious resource, to take what’s yours, is part of our genetic code.

So road rage is only natural. You can see an advantage, an edge in the grand struggle to exist: an opening two lanes over, a light that has yet to turn red, an emergency vehicle with sirens blaring you can draft behind, but there’s some idiotic old lady, who has the nerve to be driving only five miles over the speed limit, in your way. And you’re in a rush—you’re trying to get to your fantasy baseball draft or some one day sale at Nordstrom, or whatever else you’re into, and that’s what’s really important and this lady is ruining everything.

And who cares if there’s another hundred cars ahead of her, and she hasn’t yet had a safe opening to make her left turn, and she is waving apologetically out the window, and she has a bumper sticker that says “Practice Random Acts of Kindness”?

Learn to drive, grandma.

And then there’s the total opposite: when you’re fat and happy. Day off. Sun shining. Basking in satisfaction like a lion chewing on a wildebeest thigh bone. And someone is coming up from behind real fast. Something about their fast pace, the way they seem to feel entitled to the road you’re cruising on, just rubs you the wrong way. So you slow down a little bit more, maybe block them just a little from a newly forming lane. Just to show them how uptight they are, and how smooth you are. How you take life as it comes, and they are a spaz.

There is no one truly immune. The same self-righteous, do-gooders who are so quick to point out how they wake up at sunrise like a farmer (the uncontested, most virtuous of lifestyles), listen to public radio, and never watch reality TV, will claim to be above the fray. But road rage exists even in the most noble of places: church, library, and farmer’s market parking lots.

There will be no reprieve from the fight until we are all self-replicating, artificially-sustained, brain-based organisms. Then none of us will be in a rush, and we can share the road like the gentlemen that we pretend we are.