I know I’m not the only one who feels a tad nervous before hitting the road these days.
Driving anywhere feels a little bit like what I imagine playing Russian roulette must feel like, but instead of wondering if there is a bullet in the next chamber, you wonder if that F150 approaching the intersection is going to stop because it sure doesn’t look like it.
It’s alarming how so many people don’t bother with the little niceties we all learned in driver’s ed, things like using traffic signals or turning on headlights at night. No matter how brief your trip might be, such as a two-mile jaunt to the grocery store, you’re bound to come across at least a handful of near misses that, if you’d left your house fifteen seconds earlier, might have involved you.
Rolling through stop signs is a biggie. Such non-stops used to be called ‘California stops,’ presumably because Californians were too cool to let all four wheels come to a complete halt at the same time. This kind of non-stop needs to be renamed to perhaps ‘universal stop’ since apparently the entire country thinks it’s cool to blow off stop signs.
It’s a little more understandable when a driver pauses instead of stopping at an intersection late at night when there is no other traffic. Understandable, but still questionable since you never know when a bike or motorcycle or car you didn’t see because they forgot to turn their headlights on might think they’re as cool as you are and decide to roll through the intersection at the same time.
What isn’t understandable is the why behind all this errant driving behavior. Why do so many people think it’s acceptable not to follow the rules? Google it and all kinds of reasons are given. People are distracted. There are too many stop signs. Everyone is in a hurry.
Those might be valid reasons explaining why people don’t want to stop, but I’m curious why people feel entitled not to stop. Why is Driver A’s distraction/dislike of stop signs/rush more important than Driver B’s? Because that’s what it feels like — everyone thinks they deserve to get wherever they’re going a lot faster than anyone else and to hell with the other guy.
We can stretch this conversation a little farther and ask why people think it’s okay to break other rules, those annoying moral and societal rules that seem to be becoming as quaint as petticoats and landlines.
It isn’t even like people are seeing how much they can get away with. They don’t seem to realize that we’re all getting away with a lot, but the problem is that we’re getting away with a lot for now. Sooner or later the debt is going to come due.
The world today reminds me of someone who has always had an extremely high metabolism and has been able to eat anything they wanted without gaining weight so naturally they’ve never learned moderation. But over the years, their metabolism slowed and one day they woke up realizing they no longer burn calories like they used to and their jeans are suddenly tighter than the skin on a sausage.
The problem is their appetite for consumption has stayed the same. The only way to beat all that consumerism is self-control, and everyone knows that mastering self-control is not nearly as easy as getting your driver’s license. It’s also a lot easier to overconsume nowadays since with the click of a computer key we can have the entire menu of the nearest Pizza Hut delivered to our front door.
What’s the answer? Dr. Phil says we live in an age of exhibitionism which might explain TikTok but says diddly about rolling through a stop sign. The older I get, the less answers I have, especially when it comes to how other folks drive.
All I know for sure is that with each passing birthday I plan on driving less, walking more and working on developing that self-control muscle since we all know how uncomfortable wearing jeans as tight as sausage skins can be.