Ink Tea Stone Leaf

It’s important to be alert while driving, and the reasons are so obvious that it would be silly to list them here. A wise driver (and we all aspire to wisdom behind the wheel) maintains an awareness of the doings of people who are likewise traveling in multi-ton aluminum monsters, an awareness which should only increase at high speeds. Naturally, as we were traveling south yesterday to visit my in-laws for Thanksgiving, I did not fail to notice a person in the passenger seat of a powder-blue Subaru giving us a strikingly audacious middle finger as they passed us.

Within a minute the Subaru had gone far beyond us, and we never caught sight of them again. I was bemused; this sort of thing doesn’t happen every day, and I hadn’t done anything that I thought would provoke anybody to rudeness. Traffic was flowing and I was flowing right along with it, cruising in the right lane while faster drivers passed on the left. It was an entirely unremarkable bit of driving that I was doing, and people don’t go around making obscene gestures for things they don’t find remarkable.

I figured that, if the finger wasn’t in response to anything I’d done in the time that the people in the Subaru could have seen me, then it must have been provoked by something they inferred about the type of person I was, or else by something they’d seen me do at some unknown time in the past. This was still a dead end as far as reasoning could go, but with an hour between me and my destination, I had time to indulge in speculation, and in reflection as to what kind of person I might seem to be on the open road.

A hypothetical driver coming up behind me could see a few relevant pieces of information about me, including that the car I drive is electric, and it has an Oregon license plate. It has three decals in the back window, identifying me as a University of Oregon alumnus, a regular listener of a jazz radio station, and a devoted fan of the San Diego Padres. Could these facts, or some combination of them, have inspired such contempt in these individuals? I came up with a few hypotheses:

1. The people in the Subaru are affiliated with Oregon State University, or else they resent my alma mater because their families were once abducted and carried away by a flock of wild mallards.
2. The people in the Subaru resent jazz music, on account of its fiendish syncopation and because their families were once abducted and carried away by a pack of wild saxophonists.
3. The people in the Subaru are fans of the Los Angeles Dodgers, for whom even a World Series trophy can never soothe the pain of having seen their families abducted and carried away by a gang of swinging friars.
4. The people in the Subaru hate environmentally friendly technological innovations, and have done so ever since the day their fathers were publicly humiliated by an especially self-righteous LED lamp.

As the Subaru had no distinguishing stickers of its own, I could make few valid inferences to support my suppositions. In my uncertainty, a creeping anxiety arose: perhaps in the last year they had seen me make an egregious driving mistake, recognized me for my own distinguishing marks, and were now righteously shaming me for my own true sins? If I knew this for a fact, it’s entirely possible that I would have shriveled up and died of embarrassment in an instant, thus endangering everybody else on the 5 as my car plowed onward without a living driver. I believe this would technically be the Subaru’s fault.

What I eventually concluded, as pedestrian as it may seem, is that the people in the Subaru simply inferred that despite my license plate I was from California. Evidently, they felt that on this most solemn national holiday of gratitude and togetherness, it was important that I be swiftly informed about their opinions regarding Californians moving to Oregon, attending Oregonian universities, and listening to Oregonian public radio. Their opinion: not very favorable!

Having decided this was likely the case, we proceeded to Thanksgiving dinner and had a pretty swell time. Then we drove back home without incident, carrying a generous helping of genuinely delicious leftover mashed potatoes. This little incident made very little practical impact and could not ruin my day. Nevertheless, I still find myself wishing, mostly for their sake, that they hadn’t done it.

I’ll grant that a middle finger isn’t quite as disturbing to the public as the wingnut fantasias of guys with decals of Punisher skulls and automatic weapons covering their rear windows, letting every other driver know that the second the next civil war starts they will not hesitate to run smaller vehicles into ditches for fun. However, what I wonder about anybody who proudly exhibits antisocial behavior behind the wheel is, what good do they think all of this one-way communication of animosity does? Do we heal the nation by honking our horns and letting each other know just how little we value our communities, or politeness for its own sake?

I mean, I get the appeal of being an ass-hat out in the open. A couple of years ago I had the thought that it would be really funny to put “this machine kills fascists” on my bumper. If I didn’t think it was more than a little likely to get me framed for vehicular manslaughter should I happen to drive by a Proud Boys rally, I might even have gone through with it. But look at me, exercising self-restraint, not going out of my way to agitate people while they operate heavy machinery! Isn’t that plainly a better way to live?

My friends, I think it is a much better way to live. We don’t have to give way to our base and hostile impulses; we all have places to go. Let’s put on some friendly jazz and go there.