Lessons from the Ride to Work

As I was driving in to work today I noticed an annoyance on the road. Like a bee inching closer to a comfortable seat at a picnic, a car was slowly creeping up on my bumper…in the SLOW lane. Don’t ask me why, but the closing in of a front fender in my rear view mirror slowly (and in proportion to the closeness of the car) raises my blood pressure. Perhaps it is because I do that thing where I imagine what might happen. I might have to stop suddenly due to someone in front of me stopping suddenly, and this ass hole will ram into me crunching my bumper like tin foil. I will be sitting there rendered unable to turn my head to face her as she runs up to my window screaming “why in the hell did you stop so suddenly you %#@ing &*#@ head!!?” And I won’t even be able to answer that the reason is the same reason that SHE stopped suddenly, that I was too close to the car in front of me. The reason I can’t answer is because her stupid face wont stop yelling at me and trying to punch my windows while I sit in agony realizing I won’t be able to go to the gym for a week because my back and neck are injured.

None of that happened of course I just made it up, which in turn made my blood pressure go up, see?

So, eventually I saw my exit and proceeded to dramatically get off of the highway to make my point that she was too close. She didn’t notice because she was singing and as she drove on past I spotted her bumper stickers. Excellent, I thought, I can read said bumper stickers and consequently judge her as a person based on their contents. As I scanned the back of her car, suddenly EUREKA! I found it. A giant UofL decal! “Typical, no wonder she drives like an ass hole.” I thought to myself.

But almost immediately I realized what I had just done. I had grouped her and made a judgment about her character based on her membership in that group. There is a name for that….oh yes “Prejudice.”

People love to say “all of so and so’s fans are _________.” No they aren’t, they are all individual people cheering for their team. There are the wealthy ones who buy all the over priced team gear, sit in the best seats and can actually get just as out of hand as the country folk. There are the drunken fools who spill beer and yell insults at the ref about everything from their mom to their hair style. There are cute little kids, of all races, ages and class who will become the next generations of fans. We all have bad eggs who make the group as a whole look bad but that is no reason to judge the entire group. There is a small group of Muslims who are extreme terrorists and do awful things, but they are just that, a small group of bad eggs which most Muslims will tell you do NOT represent the groups’ feelings and beliefs.

The only difference between you and someone else is your god given personality combined with the way you were raised. Skin color doesn’t change who a person is inside and neither does the sports team which they happen to root for. It also doesn’t change their driving abilities, that comes from something else entirely.

Prejudice stems from a variety of places, but mostly it is a very ugly learned behavior, passed down through the ages because people have a need to feel better than others. I caught myself doing it today and wanted to call myself out because in discussing ugly behaviors we bring forward the reasons they exist and hopefully make our society more cohesive in the long run.

So, now that I don’t have a simple excuse for the lady who rode my bumper today, I can use my overactive imagination to decipher her reasons for doing so. She was listening to Journey and got a heavy foot picturing herself on Route 66 with the wind in her hair? She has dyslexia and gets confused on whether the far right or far left lane is the fast one? Perhaps she was trying to read MY bumper stickers and form judgments about me? Regardless, I thank her for being an inconsiderate driver because she really made me think today!