Slow Down, You're Moving Too Fast (or On Road Rage)

Written circa July 2006

Before you read this please take careful note of what the time is. Got it? How long it takes you to read this is very important. I don’t mean it’s a race, so don’t rush, but just remember what the exact time (to the minute) was when you began reading this.

You are driving down the highway at 80kmh, like the other thousands of motorists you currently share the road with you are on the way to work. You don’t really like your job, but hey it pays the bills. You just got a red light. Shit. You might be late for work. Come on, come on hurry up, the light’s been green for 3 seconds and that bastard up the front hasn’t moved. Finally they pull away and your column of traffic begins to move forward one by one. You are delayed by some left turning traffic and so a gap opens up in front of you. A gap for some reason you feel you must protect. You speed up to get through the light that won’t stay green forever. Then some arsehole pulls into your lane turning left from a slip lane right in front of you. You have to slow down from 60 kmh to 35 kmh and do not travel at the speed limit of 70kmh for 10 seconds less than you would have had that idiot not pulled out.

You are irate. You drive right up close behind the individual and you put your high beams on so that your lights will bother the prick in front of you when he looks in his rear view mirror. That’ll piss the arsehole off you think and gain some pleasure from that fact. You both approach another red light and so brake and come to a halt. The light has been red for some time and remains so for another 45 seconds.

Shit, you must have got every red light on the way to work today. God must hate you.

Let’s have a look at all this.

For starters you own a car. Great, you must be doing alright. That motorist puling in front of you didn’t rob you of any time because you both came to the next red light anyway. You’ve stopped at a few more red lights today than usual but I doubt that means everything’s against you. The fact you are driving down a well maintained highway with a number of other motorists who also obey the well appointed traffic signals probably means you are a member of an affluent western society. That would suggest you are particularly lucky when compared to the majority of humans on the planet.

You might be a little bit late for work. Wouldn’t you rather be somewhere else anyway? Why do you have this job? To keep the car that drove you there on the road, to pay for your place of residence. So you can afford to have a little fun with what time you have away from the employment that imposes itself on the best hours of the day in the best years of your life. Yet you’re in such a hurry to get there you consider violence toward a fellow road user (going through the same process as yourself) because they have cost you a meaningless car length. He started it you might say (as Israeli bombs rain on Lebanese civilians) but you are the one that chose to react how you did.

On to the car. There’s thousands of them in close proximity to yourself. Pumping out carbon monoxide as they idle impatiently under the control of their uptight motorists. More and more of them are going on to the roads, polluting the atmosphere, choking the highways, the wildlife and the trees. The trees that are diminishing across the planet as you read this. Diminishing the ability of the planet to recycle the increasing levels of carbon dioxide we taint it with. More trees will disappear as bigger and wider roads are built to accommodate the growing automobile population.

This mode of transport that pollutes the environment and chokes the world needs petroleum to run. Petroleum that comes from a black substance deep in the earth’s bowels known as crude oil. The human race chases this resource greedily and jealously. For this reason there are many hidden agendas amongst the political and religious propaganda that drives the strife and bickering in the middle east, also known as the holy land.

It was discovered long ago that this energy source was no good for the human race and would eventually lead to the planet they call home becoming unliveable. Nothing has been done because there is too much money in oil. Money that has blinded the rich and greedy into pursuing it to the detriment of the planet and the poor third world saps that slave away for them at the disgustingly exploitative rates that they somehow continue to get away with. This money is what is making you drive to work in an uptight manner. If it weren’t for the importance placed on this commodity that doesn’t even actually exist (except simply numbers on paper) you wouldn’t feel the need to get up in the morning, leave your loved ones behind and do something that takes up the vast majority of your day that you would really rather not do (i.e. go to work).

Certainly people need a purpose in life, however selling goods in retail, keeping the account of a business, serving ungrateful wealthy people in a café, most jobs that have come about as a result of society needing to find jobs for the overpopulated world we have created, serve little purpose in the grand scheme of things. The way things stand at the moment, the more people there are, the more we need to find jobs for them so they can earn money and not starve to death, therefore the more development needs to occur, the more destruction of the natural world occurs, impelling us down the road of killing the planet we call Earth. A road we call progress.

So many people in affluent societies seem to never quite make ends meet. They get a new higher paid job so they buy a bigger car, rent a bigger house, buy a bigger television, pay a surgeon to make certain body parts bigger. Do they really need all of this? Of course not.

On one side of the earth a society is feeding its children so much food that they are becoming morbidly obese and are expected to live shorter lives than their parents. Meanwhile on the other side of the world children, women and men are starving to death. What time did you start reading this and what time is it now (assuming you are still reading?). For every minute you read this 20 people, 20 human beings, died of malnutrition (did you eat all your breakfast this morning? How much of your dinner did you throw out last night?). So if it has taken you 5 minutes to read thus far then 100 people are dead from malnutrition (more if you stopped reading to get a snack). Look around next time you are stuck in traffic and count out 100 people; that’s how many died. By the time you’ve counted 100, another 100 have probably died.

So, is that person pulling out in front of you really that big a deal?