Road Rage
There is right. There is wrong. And there is road rage. A person can think he or she is right and the opponent in their conflict is wrong. Their opponent might think THEY are right and the OTHER ONE is the person who is wrong. Both sides see the same event and might have two completely different takes on just exactly what it is that they are seeing happening. Each is seeing it subjectively, through their own prejudiced view of the world. And so, the world spins around and everyone is out there thinking THEY are in the right and everyone else is in the wrong. And everyone takes their actions accordingly.
There is also “not very smart.” One thing you cannot be is someone who, in battling everyone else between your right and their wrong, and between their bad and your good, you end up being the person who makes the bad decision and takes the incorrect action based on reasoning that is not very smart. Because there are degrees of “not very smart.” There is the not very smart where you act like a buffoon and end up embarrassed, looking like an idiot and getting egg on your face. There is the not very smart where you do something borderline questionable that gets you fired, tossed out of school or thrown in jail. And there is the not very smart decision that can be the difference between life and death.
One such a thing happened on Saturday night and a man is dead right now who should still be alive. Race car driver Kevin Ward Jr. died in a racing accident because he made a bad decision. Most decisions and resultant actions don’t usually cause you to die, but this one did. He put himself in a place where his death turned out to be possible. He didn’t die from his car being in a wreck caused by the inherent dangers of several cars driving at high speeds on a tightly contested race track. No, he died because of road rage. He died because he got angry at another driver. He died because of the actions he took because he thought he had to prove that HE was right and the other guy was wrong. He got out of his car in the middle of (the equivalent of) a crowded freeway. And he got hit by another vehicle and killed. Yes, one bad decision and this 20-year-old child, who never really got to grow up to be a man, is now dead.
This was not a NASCAR race but it sure was NASCAR mentality. A guy racing his car gets clipped in a race by a competitor, spins out, crashes and he is taken out of the race. The guy who was wronged wants to get out of his car and go kick the ass of the guy who caused him to crash because the other guy, who caused the accident always seems to get away with it. The fans love it. Ha, ha, they think to themselves, that one guy threw a few punches at that other guy for knocking him out of the race. This NASCAR-like scenario is pretty much what happened when Kevin Ward Jr. got out of his car on that fateful night. Except circumstances caused the unthinkable tragedy that happened to be possible.
Wanting to get back at someone over a crash that puts you out of a race is not worth dying over. It doesn’t matter whether you are right or wrong. When road rage happens, there is usually something bad that happens as a result of it. People need to learn that there are very real consequences to the decisions they make. That is a very painful lesson that Kevin Ward Jr. never even got a chance to learn. But, the rest of us can learn from his mistake.
Death does not care whether you are right or wrong. It only cares about those it can claim. If you put yourself at risk where it could happen, it sometimes will happen.
(Note – six days after the on track tragedy., NASCAR invoked a new rule to prohibit drivers from leaving their cars after a track accident or incident, unless there were extenuating circumstances, such as a fire or smoke in the car’s cockpit. If such a rule were in place a week earlier, Kevin Ward Jr. would still be alive.)
