AUGUST 16, 2021 – Now that we’ve arrived home safely from a 2,900-mile road trip, I can write about silent road rage: hyper-speed.
I’ve driven and ridden on enough byways the world over to know that America has no monopoly on crazy driving. No one who survives a bus or taxi ride in Egypt or India can remain an atheist. In Italy, driving is for professional race car drivers. In Mexico, what appear as posted speed limits actually denote minimum speeds for avoiding fines in the form of cash bribes.
I probably exaggerate if I say 10 cars out of the 10,000 we encountered along the Interstate were driving at or below the speed limit. Poke along at “suggested” speeds, and you risk being run over. For the most part, semis behaved themselves, observing speed limits and signaling lane changes, but who’s the genius that thought it was okay to put trucks weighing 80,000 pounds (with a stopping distance of two football fields) on roadways with automobiles weighing an average of 4,400 pounds?
The worst corridor runs between Chicago and Indiana. On a weekday, the traffic there was at a standstill, but on Saturday, the freeway was a battle scene from Star Wars. While I gripped the controls of our X-wing fighter doing 75-80, swarms of Imperial TIE fighters blasted past us.
Among the Imperial forces was an old Toyota Yanis with Minnesota plates. The pilot was a young woman driving nonchalantly with one hand while using the other to flick cigarette ashes out the window. Her fast-disappearing vehicle was fueled by a Bernie sticker.
Another non-TIE fighter was a large, private coach pulling an over-sized trailer. The two-piece bomber passed us at only 85 or 90, then pulled in so close ahead, I feared a collision. On the back of the trailer was a large American flag framed by a stern warning: “Stomp on my flag and I’ll stomp on your ass.” So much for “law and order.”
As cars zoomed past, I wondered why. Had drivers slept through their morning alarms? Had FoxNews personalities lost their minds and told everyone to get vaccinated—now? Were people fleeing the effects of climate change while pumping out extra fumes to accelerate catastrophe? Had news of the minimum wage leaping to $100.hr. for all those jobs that can’t be filled . . . gone viral?
I later found better perspective: over the past year U.S. Covid-19 deaths (621,000) far exceeded traffic fatalities (38,680). Until driverless cars become available, however, there’s no vaccination for human insanity behind the wheel.
My wife says she’ll never ride in a driverless car because they’re “too dangerous.” That’s like saying, “I’ll take my chances with the virus because there might be mind-control chips in the vaccine.” I just read that driverless cars will be programmed to go no faster than the posted speed limit. Imagine the road rage when everyone’s vaccinated against map-cap driving!
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
