‘Nice’

Surely this is everyone’s pet peeve and I really shouldn’t take up space ranting about it… but today I was almost run over by some woman talking on her cell phone while driving. She had pulled out from a street on the left and I thought she was going to pull into the left lane, since I was clearly in the right lane, but she didn’t – just kept coming over. I slammed on the brakes, hit the horn, and did manage to avoid the crash without her assistance… as she was obviously entirely unaware that anything had happened.

Some years ago we had a ‘fantasy’ conversation about how to deal with bad drivers and came up the notion of having a ‘return to start’ button that we could use to send those really bad drivers around us right back where they came from – sort of like the ‘easy’ button in the office supply store commercial. It would only work, say, once a day, so you’d have to be discriminating about using it, but oh, to be able to have that kind of influence! Wouldn’t it be great to just zap these people right back to their own driveway, where they’d have time to contemplate their mistakes and would have to start their journey all over again, if they truly needed to be somewhere? And if they didn’t, maybe they’d just stay home.

What a fantasy, to actually have some measure of control over all those others out there who irritate us, or even try to do us harm. But I wonder, if we had it, if we’d be more careful about our own reactions to things? We wouldn’t, after all, want to be ‘zapped’ ourselves! Maybe, for example, I’d have only used the brakes today, and not the horn. (Obviously I could do better with this myself!)

Does life still work that way? Are there still people out there who would treat others as they want to be treated themselves?

Is American society still ‘nice?’