Word: rage
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...nonexistent--but it's high noon on the country's streets and highways. This is road recklessness, auto anarchy, an epidemic of wanton carmanship. Almost everyone from anywhere has a story about it, as fresh as the memory of this morning's commute. And no wonder. Incidents of "road rage" were up 51% in the first half of the decade, according to a report from the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety. Some occurrences are grisly enough to make the headlines. Last year a high-speed racing duel on the George Washington Memorial Parkway outside Washington killed two innocent commuters, including...
...than you), the moronic (those who drive slower than you) and...you. But this merely confuses the issue. Surely someone is doing all that speeding, tailgating, headlight flashing and abrupt lane changing, not to mention the bird flipping and horn blasting. There's enough in the phenomenon of road rage to keep a faculty-loungeful of social theorists thinking deeply for years--or at least until the grant money runs...
...quantity of cars has risen, the nature of the problem has changed qualitatively as well. Maybe the congestion is making everyone cranky. Americans are famously attached to their cars; it's just the driving they can't stand. "Driving and habitual road rage have become virtually inseparable," says Leon James, a professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii who specializes in the phenomenon. In the most comprehensive national survey on driving behavior so far, a Michigan firm, EPIC-MRA, found that an astounding 80% of drivers are angry most or all of the time while driving. Simple traffic congestion...
...Road-rage experts have come up with various solutions to the anarchy of our streets and highways. We could legislate it (lower speed limits, build more roads to relieve congestion), adjudicate it (more highway cops, stiffer penalties), regulate it (more elaborate licensing procedures) or educate it away (mandatory driver's ed). Others suggest an option perhaps more typical of America circa 1998: therapize...
...road-rage habit can be unlearned," says James of the University of Hawaii, "but it takes more than conventional driver's ed." He advocates teaching "emotional intelligence" as part of any thorough driver training: how to "deal with hostility expressed by drivers" and "how to be accepting of diversity and how to accommodate it." He calls for a new driver's ed program from kindergarten on--to teach "a spirit of cooperation rather than competition"--and grass-roots organizations called Quality Driving Circles. These, he told a radio station, would be "small groups of people meeting regularly together to discuss...