Angry bikers and a plan for peace
Elizabeth Reinking
Staff Writer
Something really bizarre happened to a friend of mine while he was driving last week. Let me paint you a little picture. So, he was driving down PCH with his windows down, and due to the added in-vehicle air circulation, a miscellaneous paper object (possibly a napkin) flew from the car into the lane beside him.
My friend isn’t sure what happened next, but judging from the subsequent events, he assumes that it blew into the face of a motorcyclist coming up behind him. The biker then pulled up to my friend’s open window, yelling “keep your trash in your car!” along with other less printable requests and hand gestures. My friend, who does not respond well to attacks, replied in kind, and the incident escalated to exactly what you’re imagining – my friend getting punched in the face by the biker through his own open window. The biker’s license plate, by the way, read “Put Em Up.”
After hearing this story, I walked away from it wondering first, if I could use my friend’s misfortune to my own advantage by writing about it here, and second, whether or not some kind of life lesson could be extracted from it. Sure, you could take from my friend’s misfortune that road rage is a scourge upon our society, and that people should learn how to keep their tempers. However, it seems to me that a major problem in this country today is that of suppressed anger. I mean, we’re not allowed to challenge anyone to duels anymore, and gunslinging pretty much went out in the 19th century. So what are we left with to express our anger, besides frivolous lawsuits and malicious gossip?
Personally, I think we can all learn a little something from “Mr. Put Em Up.” I mean, who says we shouldn’t just be able to punch people in the face when we feel like it? Wimps who got beat up in grade school and grew up to somehow acquire political power, that’s who. And think of the benefits of such a plan. Conflicts could be resolved so quickly. Your roommate left his dirty dishes in the sink again? Your friend used your mascara without permission? Instead of weeks of passive aggressive sulking, just pop them one. Problem solved.
Maybe punches to the face is taking it a little far. After all, we’re supposed to be adults, or so everyone keeps telling me. But let’s not scrap the whole plan just yet. Maybe instead of using fists, everyone could be issued one of those large, inflatable, brightly colored novelty mallets. You know, the ones that you get at the carnival for hitting that blinky-light stick with a giant hammer in order to intimidate passersby with your vastly superior blinky-light stick hitting skills? Yeah. Well, just take my word for it.
OK, so everyone’s been issued their novelty mallet. Now we need to lay down some ground rules. You didn’t think I’d just let you run hog-wild with those things, did you? The basic premise, of course, is that whenever someone makes you angry, they get a big head-whomp with the mallet. Not every incident is worthy of a whomp, though. I’m trying to resolve our anger issues, not start a massive campus-wide whomp epidemic. I could set up a toll-free hotline. (800)-IM-ANGRY. I imagine the calls would go something like this:
“Hello. Thanks for calling the Head-Whomp Hotline. How can I help you?”
“Um, hi. So I was eating one of those massive HAWC cookies just now, and my friend is all, ‘Ew. Do you have any idea how many grams of fat are in that cookie? If you keep eating like that, you’re going to get totally fat.’”
“Mmmm-hmmm.”
“So can I whomp her for that?”
“Describe to me what she was doing when she said it.”
“Well, her nose was kind of scrunched up like she was smelling raw sewage, and she was chewing a carrot while doing crunches.”
“Okay, let me just plug that into the computer – yeah, she’s definitely looking at a minimum two whomps.”
“Wow! Thanks so much!”
I can see it now. A campus full of blissfully serene students, going about their daily lives in perfect unbroken harmony, except for the occasional whomp of an inflatable novelty mallet. And all thanks to an unsecured paper napkin and an irritable PCH motorocyclist.
09-09-2004