Honking tends to be a bit opaque from a little distance. It is hard to tell from the honking halfway around the rotary which was the jerk who took the space they shouldn't. I tend to be charitable when I can, not faulting a person for getting an ambiguous assessment wrong. The approaching car may have looked like it was slowing. They might be from out-of-town. Sometimes it is more than clear, like the kid staring you down as they cut you off. (I wonder if I just picked off a particularly egregious offender from time-to-time that the rest would get the message. Haven't done it yet.)
I am not especially tolerant of honking tailgaters, especially if they are leaning on the horn and closing the gap rather than just tooting a bit of annoyance. But I think I am increasingly seeing something different, of the tailgater getting very close, then holding down the horn only as they are separating, one going one way and one going another, or as the one behind finally gets a spot to pass. It's one last scream by the guy behind. This seems a cultural deterioration. The tailgater doesn't get anything, as he might have from a "Wake up, dude" couple of toots.
Maybe I'm just old and want those kids to get off my lawn.
2 comments:
"This seems a cultural deterioration."
There is a difference between corrective honking and punitive honking.
About the only time I honk is when the light turns green, and the car in front doesn't move within a second or so. Someone honking to say, "Pay attention", "What are you doing?" or "My car is here.", is being informative.
Laying on the horn while pulling around the obstructive driver, is punitive. It's like yelling out the window, or flipping the guy off. Which we used to do, so maybe it isn't cultural deterioration.
With 350 million people in the country, if you'd like to find signs of cultural deterioration, you can. All anyone can do is try not to be a jerk.
Driving in Houston yesterday, I gave and received one honk. To give is better to receive, at least so far as honking is concerned, and the honk I gave was what Randomizer calls "corrective." I may have been in the blind spot of a lane-changer who had already impressed me as careless. The honk I received was "punitive" and naturally, to my mind, undeserved. I think expressed road rage may be partly a sign of cultural deterioration, but that it also takes more natural serenity to stay calm on modern roads. Some men are naturally irascible and Houston traffic is guaranteed to send an irascible man into spasms of rage. Patience is a virtue, particularly when traversing twenty-five miles of suburban sprawl.
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