Word: ragingly
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...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...
Will it work? A better question might be, Do we want it to? Road-rage therapists come perilously close to calling for a transformation of the national character--remaking our rough-and-tumble, highly individualistic country into a large-scale version of a college town where everyone recycles kitty litter, drinks latte, listens to Enya and eats whole grains. Is that really what we want? For all its dangers, road rage may simply be a corruption of those qualities that Americans have traditionally, and rightly, admired: tenacity, energy, competitiveness, hustle--something, in other words, to be contained and harnessed...
People always used to say nice things about my mother's blue eyes, which I inherited. We use our blue eyes to stare at each other now. Hers are full of rage, and mine are searching for a way to relieve the pain, which I pray is mine alone...