David Spates "Therefore I Am" Published June 22, 2004

I'm amazed any of us survived road rage

Did we find a cure for road rage that no one told me about? A pill? A gel? An ointment, maybe? Perhaps a psychiatrist developed a therapy that helps people "better implement their anger-management skills."

Whatever the solution, road rage isn't a problem in this country anymore. How do I know? Road rage isn't mentioned in the national media. It doesn't get any play in print, on TV or even on radio. The issue has evaporated into nothingness, gone the way of Drew Carey's career.

I'm quite certain that until you read the first sentence of my column, you hadn't seen the phrase "road rage" in months, probably years. Why? Well, in all seriousness, the truth is the men and women who edit newspapers like The New York Times and produce TV shows like "Dateline" got bored with road rage. They squeezed every bit of interest they could from the issue, and now it's done. It's as simple as that.

But of course road rage hasn't stopped just because the big-time media outlets got bored with it. It's very difficult to gather official statistics on something so nebulous a topic as road rage, but I'm certain that it remains a problem in America. For all I know, the problem is even worse than it was back in the late 1990s when fear gripped the drivers across the fruited plain. Gas was cheap back in the day. It's nearly 2 bucks a gallon now, a factor that would seem to pile on the rage.

I found a 1998 Time article that warned, "It's high noon on the country's streets and highways. This is road recklessness, auto anarchy, an epidemic of wanton carmanship."

Yikes! I'm amazed I survived such a tumultuous time. Did I even drive that year? I must have been asleep at the wheel in 1998 because I just don't remember road rage being a big problem. Sure, I read about road rage, but I never actually experienced it. I didn't even witness it happening to someone else. For that matter, I don't know of anyone who was subjected to an act of road rage.

If anything, I would think reports of road rage would have increased since 1998, even without gas-price hikes. Americans are so hypersensitive these days that you can't honk your horn without folks getting offended. Even a polite honk at the intersection will result in a crestfallen look and a feeling of victimization, when all you're doing is gently reminding the knucklehead in front of you that the light has been green for a good 12 seconds now.

Americans cars should come equipped with three different horns. One all-encompassing sound just doesn't cut it in a society so in touch with its "feelings."

The first horn would be a noninvasive, cordial beep-beep that sounds as though it was taken from a Key West rental scooter. You'd use this one in the situation I just described, where you simply need to shake a driver out of the daze he's in. Hey, everyone zones out from time to time. I do, too. We've all been at a red light, fiddling with the radio only to suddenly realize that seven cars in front of you have long since motored through the green light that changed an eternity ago. A nice "pardon me" beep from the driver behind you would have sufficed without anyone getting their feelings hurt. How gracious.

The second horn would be the one we have now -- a good, solid honk that let's everyone within earshot know that a potentially serious problem is brewing. You're not worried about being polite when you use this horn. This is an attention-getter designed to keep everyone safe. If this honk upsets your sensibilities, well, that's just too bad. A honk like this is what the situation called for. If it distressed you, take it up with your shrink.

The third horn would be used only in extreme circumstances -- a fog horn like oil tankers use, the kind you can hear for miles, nautical or otherwise. It's a horn so loud that it would cause immediate and irreparable damage to your engine block. It probably should be encased in glass with big red letters: "For emergency use only." You'd use this one when destruction, danger and death is a foregone conclusion, and you're simply trying to keep collateral damage to a minimum. Let's say you're on I-40 East. You just crossed into Roane County, and you begin the long, curvy, winding descent down the mountain. Suddenly your brakes completely give out and gravity pulls your speedometer well past the 120 mph mark. There's absolutely no way to stop your car until Newton's First Law of Motion kicks in. Give a quick Hail Mary, break the glass lay on the horn. You'll be doing us all a great service.

Three horns may not be a cure for road rage, but it certainly would be a step in the right direction. That's assuming road rage was ever a big problem in the first place.

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David Spates is a Knoxville resident and Crossville Chronicle contributor whose column is published each Tuesday. He can be reached at davespates@chartertn.net.