Remember when you were a kid riding in the backseat of your parents' car next to your brother or sister? So there you were minding your own business when for no good reason at all your lousy sibling breathed all over you! Maybe they even touched you! So you poked them, and they poked back and pretty soon your mom intervenes, like she's NATO or something. She establishes a neutral zone running across the middle of the back seat foolishly believing she has provided a workable solution. But before long both hostile parties are encroaching on the neutral zone and hostilities recur.
Wouldn't it be great if this sort of ridiculous BS ended with childhood? You always hear stories on the news about how some adult returns to a party or bar he was kicked out of and violence ensues with fatal results. Tip of the iceberg! Only the fatal stories make the news. I am sure it happens much more often but only results in assault and battery (not newsworthy). Street gangs are always encroaching on each other. But it's not just gangsters and drunks that do this encroachment stuff. Tons of otherwise rational human beings get totally territorial out there on the road! You can see people who probably have good jobs, stable homes and a lot to live for risking life and limb to either invade or defend a car length of space!
Encroaching on others and defending "our space" is really bizarre! But it's a prime way in which we justify anger. "Of course I'm mad he got in my space!" It feels threatening and we respond by threatening back. So two adults wind up escalating in anger and chasing each other down the freeway like idiots meanwhile endangering literally dozens and dozens of other people who just trying to get home alive. Sounds kind of pathetic when you look at it objectively. But when we are justifying our anger by engaging in mutually threatening behavior we are not objective.
Here is the kicker, it's not just children, or just drunks or hoodlums or even otherwise rational adults who engage in this stuff. Political parties, special interest groups, religious groups, and countries behave the same way. Just imagine what would happen if we heard that North Korea had a naval ship anywhere near Hawaii! Or even in the Sea of Japan, we would send an aircraft carrier task force there right away! Of course we would after all we couldn't let them get away with that. All over the world countries are busy breathing all over their neighbors or even touching them daring them to poke back. And we treat this stuff with such seriousness, as if our leaders are intelligent adults not spoiled children.
Maybe it's time we put a dividing line down the backseat! "Now listen if you cannot behave and leave each other alone I swear I'll turn this vehicle around and nobody will get any ice cream!
(to be continued)
Russell
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