Before becoming the most iconic artist of the 1980s, American painter Patrick Nagel spent two years in Vietnam in combat as a paratrooper. When asked by a reporter what it was like to be shot at as he parachuted down into the jungle, the man who created the cover of Duran Duran’s Rio album, who transformed the world’s conception of female beauty by creating the lithe, cool “Nagel Woman” reflected for a moment and then replied, “You learn not to take things personally.”
If only Canadian drivers had such insight. We take things very personally. Road rage is rife on our roads. We get statistics on it almost every month. It is a blight Canadians drivers see all around them but deny being responsible for. A new survey by Ratesdotca shows that while 83 per cent of drivers in Ontario and Alberta claimed to have witnessed road rage, only 6 per cent admit to committing it.
While it’s a small sample – 745 Ontarians and 235 Albertans – its findings are intriguing. The survey defines road rage as “honking, flashing lights, obscene gesturing, tailgating, slamming brakes, colliding into another vehicle intentionally, rolling down the window to yell at or cutting off other drivers, cyclists or pedestrians or getting out of your vehicle to confront others.”
A few of these exist in a grey area.
Honking, to which 47 per cent surveyed witnessed and 24 per cent admitted to being guilty of, may be road rage if the person is merely trying to abuse another driver but is it road rage to honk at a driver who sits at a flashing green looking at their phone? I call that aural encouragement. Ditto for flashing lights (37 per cent witnessed, 8 per cent admitted to doing). It is perfectly acceptable to flash your lights at a vehicle that is travelling too slow.
I don’t find the results too mystifying. People don’t like admitting when they act poorly.
To me, road rage has been and will always be, straightforward. Road rage is God’s way of saying, “These people are idiots.”
Only an idiot would risk his life (sorry, it’s almost always men) and the lives of others because of some perceived traffic incident, like being cut off or being on the receiving end of a rude gesture. How delicate is your ego? Social media is full of road rage videos. What do they all have in common? The people “raging” in these clips are so stupid they should not only be banned from driving, using machinery or being employed in any job that requires any communication more sophisticated than blinking, they should probably not be allowed to feed themselves.
I can’t write enough negative things about drivers who commit road rage. They deserve society’s scorn and retribution. Tailgaters, or those who try to collide with other vehicles or who get out of their cars to start fights, should be forced to suffer all the torments of hell (it gets a bad rap, but one of Hell’s upside’s is that it is full of road ragers). In a more enlightened era, they would have been burned at the stake. Sadly, such a golden age has passed.
The term “road rage” first began making news headlines in the late 1980s. Today, you don’t even have to be on a road to be guilty. This week, an Australian skipper was charged with using his power boat to zig-zag in front of a ferry full of protesters “creating large wake waves for the century-old vessel to collide into.” The skipper was charged with operating a vessel “in a menacing manner and operating a recreational vessel recklessly.”
By the 1990s, it was part of the vernacular and sordid road rage littered the media, such as the Rhode Island driver who, in 1994, killed a fellow motorist with the crossbow he kept in the truck or the 40-year-old mother of two who shot and killed a 34-year-old mother of three because she felt her victim had cut her off on a highway.
Interviewed about such incidents in 1994, the late Clifton Bryant, who was a sociology professor at Virginia Polytechnical Institute, blamed a low threshold for patience, saying “The automobile is a very powerful machine that transports people not only geographically but psychologically. A person who controls it controls a vast amount of power. All kinds of things can go wrong with it, and the most frustrating of all is all the traffic you encounter with all these other drivers who, unlike yourself, are all idiots making your life miserable.”
I’d say not much has changed, except we now have mobile devices to distract and delight us.
In a perfect world, scary statistics and stern words would dissuade those predisposed to road rage. But in the world of the road ragers, it’s always someone else’s fault. Just ask them, they’ll tell you.
But maybe one more try won’t hurt. Patrick Nagel said it before and I’ll say it again: Don’t take it personally. Especially when you are on the road.