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I don’t have a problem with the fact that any idiot, regardless of age, visual acuity, response ability, perception, or emotional disorder, can get and keep a driver’s license. Really, I don’t. The issue isn’t that a paraplegic rhesus monkey with arthritis and cataracts would probably prove more adept at successfully navigating an automobile from Point A to Point B than the average American. The issue is Freedom.
But let’s face facts: there are too many people on the road. Our nation’s thoroughfares are choked with impatient motorists who need to get to where they’re going. They need to. It’s important. Much more important than, say, your need to get to where you’re going.
And that’s just it, right? Driving an automobile fosters an insidious and amazingly potent sense of autonomy. You’re wrapped in your own womb of dent-resistant steel and impact-resistant glass, and totally in control. By lightly (or not so lightly) pressing a little pedal, by the mere turning of a wheel, you are Commandeering Your Destiny. Alone in the world, with all the power and speed you need right at your fingertips and under your shoes, you boldly assert yourself without fear of reprisal. You’re in control. You Make The Call! Whatever’s happening Outside is irrelevant; this is your world, your sleek mobile oyster, and no one is going to come between yourself and your objective.
It’s important to feel powerful, individual, like the one who’s in charge, and our cars help us achieve a healthy sense of self. Of course, they can allow us to take things too far. Professionals refer to this as “acting like an asshole”. Strapped into our four-wheeled bullets, it’s all too easy for us to cross that line, to believe we are masters of not only our own domain, but the big Domain, the whole enchilada, and that we are inviolate, gods, indestructible.
But we’re not. And it’s high time something was done to help us, as drivers, balance our power with caution.
People get killed every day on the road. Lots of ‘em. And more than ninety percent of the time, the cause is driver error. The car doesn’t malfunction, the guy in it does something irretrievably stupid. And it kills him. And it often kills innocent others as well. And what happens? Car companies take measures to make their products safer, knowing fully well the car was perfectly safe to begin with, but the driver was “acting like an asshole”. But car companies don’t make people, they make cars, so all they can do is make safer cars. And people read about the safer cars, and what do they do?
They assume that now it’s safe to “act like an asshole”. Because the car is safe, right?
Doesn’t this seem a bit irrational?
Wouldn’t the opposite action achieve the opposite, and desired, result?
Do you think, for instance, that a man merging into heavy highway traffic from a freeway on-ramp would assume that “they’re going to have to let me in” if his car was made of, say, balsa wood, Carpenter’s Glue, and light-gauge wire? Of course not. He’d wait for a sizable gap in traffic, don’t you think? And what about the woman talking on her cell-phone while applying eye shadow and eating a grilled chicken sandwich? Wouldn’t she be paying more attention to her driving if it was common knowledge that a car’s braking apparatus was nothing but two sheets of rubber that fell off all the time, and that most steering columns tend to get swimmy after the first seven or eight miles? I daresay she would.
If safer vehicles result in more drivers “acting like an asshole” out of a false sense of security, wouldn’t rickety deathtraps result in more drivers playing it safe and remaining alert out of a very real sense of impending fatality?
Take it a step further. The Ford Motor Company announces that one out of every thousand cars rolling off of their assembly line will come equipped with a special censor which reads the distance between it and any other large moving object. If the equipped Ford comes within five feet of another car, the sensor ignites its own fuel tank, causing a lethal explosion. Would people drive more carefully? Of course they would. Would they stop buying Fords? Probably not. After all, people are people, and they’re very nice cars. Even if they did, the Ford Motor company could simply require its employees to all drive Fords, unequipped with the sensor, naturally. Does that Mustang next to you belong to a Ford employee? Who can tell? Well, you’d probably drive carefully, then, wouldn’t you say?
Making automobiles safer has done nothing to stem the vast majority of accidents caused by drivers “acting like assholes”. Making them far more dangerous can do nothing but good, by forcing America’s motorists to be more careful out of the fear of their own painful, messy deaths.
And if asinine drivers continue to get themselves killed?
Well, they probably didn’t deserve to have their drivers’ licenses anyway.
Just an idea.
Weakfish@compuserve.com
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