Coping with Road Rage

I am, by nature a pretty mellow person. And I've been able to take almost everything in stride. But there is something about traffic that makes me totally insane.

Really, the entire act of driving is insane. There are over 40,000 people killed each year in highway fatalities. Really take a full minute to think about that, instead of just looking at the number and saying: "40k? Yeah, that seems right." This is dying, ceasing to be, exiting physical reality because you wanted to go from one place to another.

It's funny, we live in such a culture of fear, where we are terrified by every little thing, from Anthrax (5 deaths in the last 3 years) to urban snipers (<50 deaths in the last 3 years) to murder (roughly 17,000 a year, many of whom engage in high-risk professions, like stealing from drug dealers), and yet we aren't afraid of the things that really are dangerous. If you wanted to live in fear rationally, you'd run in terror from McDonald's, Marlboros and automobiles: that's what's doing all the killing in this country. (Perhaps the only one we properly fear is tobacco, but then we fear it irrationally too, in the form of "secondhand smoke" which still has never been solidly shown to have a serious effect on cancer rates.) In fact, among 24-34 year olds, more people kill themselves than are murdered by someone else. So statistically speaking, you have more to fear from the person in the mirror than anyone you see on the street.

In any case, I've developed a new coping mechanism that might help others as well as its helped me, and I thought I'd share. I imagine that every other person driving is my mother. I still will get upset, and I've even been known occasionally to yell out, "Screw you, Mom!" but that only helps me get back to how silly the whole thing is. And that's enough to defuse it, and get me back to sanity.