April 13th, 2006
One day a few weeks ago I was driving my car, while in the passenger seat was a young friend of mine. I was just about to turn left (the light had already turned red) and a car came barreling through the intersection coming the other way very late after the light had changed. If I had not been paying rapt attention, and not slammed on the brakes, it would've been a nasty, perhaps deadly, little head-on collision.
Driving the car that was coming the other way was a very young woman, probably just barely out of her teens, and as I hit the brakes, I said something and shook my head in general reaction, not to the other driver in particular. In the little instant that the two faces pass each other at high speed (her speed—my car was stopped in the middle of the intersection), the other driver put the most unpleasant expression on her face and flipped me the bird.
Despite the near-death experience, my friend and I both found this very funny. She was so obviously wrong in deciding to run the light, but decided to blame us for it and flip us off instead. I guess she saw me shaking my head or saw me mouthing something, and felt that justified everything. After all, how dare I get upset that she nearly killed all three of us?
Well, after we laughed about it for a moment or two, the event was fairly quickly forgotten. In this town, people running red lights is perfectly normal ... SOP, in fact: There's probably something wrong with you if you aren't doing it yourself. And there's no point in getting all testy and self-righteous about it (although I still do sometimes).
So I started mentioning this incident on a motorcycling forum the other day as an example of why motorcycles must be ridden with great caution in this city.
But I had to stop myself and rewrite the story to be gender-neutral and age-agnostic. Why? Because I was afraid of "emotionally charging" the discussion. Basically, I didn't want to fuel an argument between the "can't-help-myself-I'm-gonna-say-something-accusing" crowd and the "this-PC-shit-is-ridiculous" contingent, since I agree with neither side fully.
Furthermore, I was afraid of judgments about me! I thought that maybe the over-keen observer might see something in the words that I hadn't intended:
- "Got a problem with women, he does ... can't handle a woman telling him to fuck off. He needs to work it out with his mother before he goes on a violent anti-feminist murdering spree."
- "Notice, Karl, how he went out of his way to mention the age of the other driver?"
"Why, yes, John Paul. Angst about getting older, perhaps?"And so while I am self-censoring myself in fears of being over-analysed about my response to the sex and age of the other driver, I am left begging for people to notice the obvious: She nearly killed me, my friend, and herself because of aggressive dangerous driving, and then showed unpleasantness and a complete lack of remorse in response.
(At least the cab driver who did almost exactly the same thing two nights ago had the decency to look guilty ... oh, and talking about charged language, can you imagine if I were to mention his ethnicity? Yeowch!)
I know this is not a new concept, we all find ourselves being careful about our choices of words. But the reasons we are doing it are all wrong:
There are little social piranhas that swim about inside our culture, and take a chunk of flesh out of everyone who utters anything that could somehow possibly be twisted to mean ageism, racism, or sexism ... even if the meaning couldn't be farther from it. They are small, generally bureaucratic minds, which are often paradoxically both self-satisfied and self-doubting at the same time. They see words and try every unpleasant permutation of meaning until they find something that can be classified as "wrong" and then call it.
These piranhas have nothing to do with the people they purport to be protecting. They don't care about the plight of minorities, older, younger, women, or disabled; they are only about trying to show the world how clever they are ... and end up biting nearly all of us to do it.
And our fear of saying the wrong thing is all about those piranhas, and nothing about the real point of why language was originally scrutinized in the first place! We are afraid of the wrong things when we speak, and it's not just the folks we are supposed to be sensitive to that lose ... we all lose.
So, about the story at the top, I'm going to say it here: That girl needs to learn to calm down and drive more safely before she kills herself or someone else!
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