Just a few nights ago my wife and I were returning from something or another. On our road home we had an unpleasant experience. As the cars coming from an entrance ramp were merging onto the main road a car in the right lane scooted over suddenly to make room for them. A little abrupt but awfully nice. This was surprising, but not too troubling. I simply moved over into the empty left lane and the scooter scooted back.
When things stabilized again I started to move back into the center lane. My exit was coming up and I anticipated no further difficulties. But as we slipped back into our previous lane we had a most unwelcome greeting from our fellow traveler as the car that had moved around earlier began to blare his horn at us most insistently.
As far as it goes this was excusable. The best I could figure we had each begun to move towards the center lane at the same time. I had not seen him in my mirror since he wasn’t there. This was warrant for a mild outbreak of honking to signal his displeasure at my apparent recklessness. For this fellow, however, mildness was not a virtue.
He began to honk his horn. He did not honk his horn and then go on about his business. He honked his horn and honked his horn and honked his horn. Apparently he was under the impression that we still had not gotten the proper impression of his most noble displeasure because as he continued to honk and honk and honk he felt it necessary to drive all the way up until he was riding up on our bumper.
I tapped my brakes once or twice to “encourage” him to move right along. This worked but only for a time as he came back again to honk up close and personal. I was preparing to continue on past our exit since it seemed this avid driver would likely follow us to continue his disclaimer in person, but this presented the problem of just how far down the road we would find ourselves before cooler heads prevailed.
In the end this gentleman (I am making a biased assumption against my own gender in this case. Idiotic ravings of anger seem to be a specialty of ours.) only stopped his admonition when he got off the interstate himself. Since this was barely beyond where we’d intended to exit ourselves we were at little loss for the whole affair. We got to get our groceries and he got to express himself.
It is this expression that continues to puzzle me. Just what was it that he was accomplishing? Had he simply wanted to politely warn me that I had veered into his lane, then a rather ordinary tapping of the horn would have been sufficient. Had he been somewhat put off by my driving habits and wished to inform me of his angst a few short seconds would have accomplished this accordingly. Had he done this I might have felt properly chastised and been far more careful and respectful of the drivers in my fair city.
But just what was he hoping to accomplish by raging his horn for a full one or two minutes while driving along at 65 miles an hour? He cannot have been thinking that blaring the horn would make me feel bad. We all know what it is like when someone yells at you far beyond the point of reason. Even if we’re being decried for a fair reason we stop listening after the first chapter.
When this guy went from a short bark of anger to an endless diatribe of rage he changed himself from a man speaking his mind to a slave to his own passions. He ceased to be acting with any sort of control of himself. Had he been in control he would have seen that a three second honk would have been far more shaming to me than his two minute ramble.
From that point on he ceased to be speaking to anyone but himself. He wasn’t honking because of what he thought it conveyed to me. He was honking because his rage felt good. It felt good to vent out some of the anger that he felt inside. Doing that does more than simply to vent your anger. It feeds the anger and increases the pleasure that you can take from it. Anger is a powerful and self-sustaining drug that is all too easy to become a willing worshiper of.
How do I know what this guy was feeling? I know for the same reason that anyone else knows about this truly guilty pleasure. When someone does something that annoys us or even genuinely enrages us nothing feels quite so good as to let all that passion slip up from our hearts and onto their waiting heads.
It is the same thing as when we are feeling depressed. When we are feeling emotionally wretched, the logical thing for us to do would be to put on a happy face. We should go find the happiest, sunniest movie we can find to drive our dark spirits from us. After all the whole problem with feeling bad is that it feels bad, right?
As logical as that might well be, it is all too rarely that any of us actually do this. We’d rather sit there in our muck of melancholy and let it dribble all over our minds until we are wallowing in self-pity. Think about it. When you are in a grouchy mood you will bark at anyone or anything that comes across your radar. You feel a sick sense of pleasure because you were able to inflict trauma upon another.
These sorts of reactions to internal malaise should remind us of two facts that we’d all like to pretend are not twisted into our very beings. The first fact is that we aren’t all that reasonable beings. If we were clear-headed then the thing we’d want the most when we’re upset is for someone to come along and help us be cheerful. But how does it really happen in life? When we’re upset there’s nothing that makes us so very livid as someone coming along with a “sunny side of life” attitude. When we’re upset, we want to keep being upset.
Tragically it goes far farther than this. At those times we take pleasure in causing pain in others. If you don’t believe me then ask yourself why you bark at your neighbor or spouse or child when you are angry. Why do you bite the head off of someone who accidentally bumps into you when you’re angry when you wouldn’t when you’re in a good mood? Why do you mindlessly and endlessly honk you’re horn at someone when you’re running late when you don’t if you’ve got plenty of time?
We human beings are not nice people. We can pretend that we are gentle souls, and offer up self-justifications for when we do act out of our grumpiness. We can say that “They deserve to be yelled at!” We try our best to stifle our anger deep inside and end up either a passionless drone or stress-hardened heart. Or we can let our emotions fly which ever way they feel and live as a slave to our hormonal and circumstantial immediacy.
None of these seems a truly human life. To be human is to be more than a mobile emotion projector. There are times in our lives when things will anger us to no end and we cannot deny this. What we can do is to work to modify the manner in which we express this anger. We can work to see that we do not make ourselves the greater fool by exploding at the foolishness of those around us and to work to adjust our own behavior to others so as not to tempt them devolve into lesser versions of themselves.
When things stabilized again I started to move back into the center lane. My exit was coming up and I anticipated no further difficulties. But as we slipped back into our previous lane we had a most unwelcome greeting from our fellow traveler as the car that had moved around earlier began to blare his horn at us most insistently.
As far as it goes this was excusable. The best I could figure we had each begun to move towards the center lane at the same time. I had not seen him in my mirror since he wasn’t there. This was warrant for a mild outbreak of honking to signal his displeasure at my apparent recklessness. For this fellow, however, mildness was not a virtue.
He began to honk his horn. He did not honk his horn and then go on about his business. He honked his horn and honked his horn and honked his horn. Apparently he was under the impression that we still had not gotten the proper impression of his most noble displeasure because as he continued to honk and honk and honk he felt it necessary to drive all the way up until he was riding up on our bumper.
I tapped my brakes once or twice to “encourage” him to move right along. This worked but only for a time as he came back again to honk up close and personal. I was preparing to continue on past our exit since it seemed this avid driver would likely follow us to continue his disclaimer in person, but this presented the problem of just how far down the road we would find ourselves before cooler heads prevailed.
In the end this gentleman (I am making a biased assumption against my own gender in this case. Idiotic ravings of anger seem to be a specialty of ours.) only stopped his admonition when he got off the interstate himself. Since this was barely beyond where we’d intended to exit ourselves we were at little loss for the whole affair. We got to get our groceries and he got to express himself.
It is this expression that continues to puzzle me. Just what was it that he was accomplishing? Had he simply wanted to politely warn me that I had veered into his lane, then a rather ordinary tapping of the horn would have been sufficient. Had he been somewhat put off by my driving habits and wished to inform me of his angst a few short seconds would have accomplished this accordingly. Had he done this I might have felt properly chastised and been far more careful and respectful of the drivers in my fair city.
But just what was he hoping to accomplish by raging his horn for a full one or two minutes while driving along at 65 miles an hour? He cannot have been thinking that blaring the horn would make me feel bad. We all know what it is like when someone yells at you far beyond the point of reason. Even if we’re being decried for a fair reason we stop listening after the first chapter.
When this guy went from a short bark of anger to an endless diatribe of rage he changed himself from a man speaking his mind to a slave to his own passions. He ceased to be acting with any sort of control of himself. Had he been in control he would have seen that a three second honk would have been far more shaming to me than his two minute ramble.
From that point on he ceased to be speaking to anyone but himself. He wasn’t honking because of what he thought it conveyed to me. He was honking because his rage felt good. It felt good to vent out some of the anger that he felt inside. Doing that does more than simply to vent your anger. It feeds the anger and increases the pleasure that you can take from it. Anger is a powerful and self-sustaining drug that is all too easy to become a willing worshiper of.
How do I know what this guy was feeling? I know for the same reason that anyone else knows about this truly guilty pleasure. When someone does something that annoys us or even genuinely enrages us nothing feels quite so good as to let all that passion slip up from our hearts and onto their waiting heads.
It is the same thing as when we are feeling depressed. When we are feeling emotionally wretched, the logical thing for us to do would be to put on a happy face. We should go find the happiest, sunniest movie we can find to drive our dark spirits from us. After all the whole problem with feeling bad is that it feels bad, right?
As logical as that might well be, it is all too rarely that any of us actually do this. We’d rather sit there in our muck of melancholy and let it dribble all over our minds until we are wallowing in self-pity. Think about it. When you are in a grouchy mood you will bark at anyone or anything that comes across your radar. You feel a sick sense of pleasure because you were able to inflict trauma upon another.
These sorts of reactions to internal malaise should remind us of two facts that we’d all like to pretend are not twisted into our very beings. The first fact is that we aren’t all that reasonable beings. If we were clear-headed then the thing we’d want the most when we’re upset is for someone to come along and help us be cheerful. But how does it really happen in life? When we’re upset there’s nothing that makes us so very livid as someone coming along with a “sunny side of life” attitude. When we’re upset, we want to keep being upset.
Tragically it goes far farther than this. At those times we take pleasure in causing pain in others. If you don’t believe me then ask yourself why you bark at your neighbor or spouse or child when you are angry. Why do you bite the head off of someone who accidentally bumps into you when you’re angry when you wouldn’t when you’re in a good mood? Why do you mindlessly and endlessly honk you’re horn at someone when you’re running late when you don’t if you’ve got plenty of time?
We human beings are not nice people. We can pretend that we are gentle souls, and offer up self-justifications for when we do act out of our grumpiness. We can say that “They deserve to be yelled at!” We try our best to stifle our anger deep inside and end up either a passionless drone or stress-hardened heart. Or we can let our emotions fly which ever way they feel and live as a slave to our hormonal and circumstantial immediacy.
None of these seems a truly human life. To be human is to be more than a mobile emotion projector. There are times in our lives when things will anger us to no end and we cannot deny this. What we can do is to work to modify the manner in which we express this anger. We can work to see that we do not make ourselves the greater fool by exploding at the foolishness of those around us and to work to adjust our own behavior to others so as not to tempt them devolve into lesser versions of themselves.
