Maybe you’ve had this
experience. You are stopped by a traffic light. You are in the right-hand
lane of a four-lane street. You intend to go straight ahead when the light
turns green.
Before it does
though, you hear a horn blow, and it is no mere toot. It is full-blown, its
length announcing the presence of an Attitude.
You look about expecting to see someone blocking another car,
or about to swerve into the attitudinal honker’s lane. Either scenario would
justify a good warning honk.
But you see that the only other car around is a rather
crappy looking old thing, sitting low to the ground, painted with a worn patina
of gun-metal primer – the kind that might encoat a nuclear submarine.
USS Heap is right on your rear bumper, its driver grimacing
in a millennial scrunch.
The traffic light has only been red for about 30 seconds,
and now it turns green. You proceed cautiously ahead with an eye on your
rear-view mirror.
Once clear, you see Joe Honker jerk his car into a sharp
right-hand turn … and was that an ugly hand gesture directed at you?
He roars off – not because he’s got a hot engine. It’s just
a wimpy four-banger with holes in the muffler, the kind you jab with an
ice-pick to make it sound souped-up.
Once you are clear of the intersection and safely on the way
you reflect on this rencontre.
Why would a reasonable driver demand with an obnoxious honk
that you – showing no right-hand-turn signal – would break the law and run a
red light so that he could exercise his right to turn right on red?
Of course it was irrational…but not an isolated incident
these days. I’ve experienced others, and they seem to have proliferated in
recent months. You may have had similar encounters.
Can we understand this phenomenon?
Is it drugs? Or is it some sort of twisted understanding of
entitlement? Certainly it’s nothing new and seems to be more widespread
nowadays.
I think it could be both – maybe one too many Red Bulls? –
combined with a sense of egocentric entitlement. Entitlements, after all, seem to
be much in the patois of politicians and their toadies these days. We are
raising generations of attitudinally challenged newly “entitled” folks. Add
them to the already entitled notions many of us may have just by virtue of
being theoretically free people, and we have ourselves a social stew with a
hint of advanced navel-gazing in the mix.
And can that be the product of politicians over-promising
increasingly credulous generations no longer expected to leave high school – or
college, for that matter – with a complete understanding of our Constitutional heritage
and the rule of law?
And worse – are these historically deprived folks unable to
understand that we do not have the right to challenge the rights of others just
for the selfish need to turn right on red when someone else is ahead of them?
How petty.
And how dangerous.
