I was heading east on the busy street near my home. I stopped at the red light and put on my right turn signal. I began turning. When I was midway through the turn, I heard someone slamming on a horn. I saw two trucks coming at me. I stopped. They zoomed in front of me. Confused, I tried to figure out what had just happened.
They had been heading west, ie, in the opposite direction as I, and turning left, ie, into the same street as I. I already had signaled and had begun turning when they careened onto the road, one after the other. Meaning that instead of slowing down and waiting for me to turn, they decided they would risk their lives and mine, so as to aggressively push through.
After pausing, I looked at the lights in the intersection. Had I missed something about the lights, I asked myself, despite the fact that I have done the same move several times a week for the past half year. No, I concluded, they were just bullies.
Who are these people? I was tempted to find out, when I saw one of the trucks turn right into a neighborhood road. But chances are that someone who would pull a move like that, I reasoned, would not talk rationally or caringly about what had just happened. Instead, this individual would probably also shout so as to drown me out – leaving me with two options there as on the road: either escalate the situation, or back down.
What the fuck. That’s what these kinds of people do. When someone chooses to bully, to take up more than her/his fair share of space, that leaves the caring and gentle types with two choices: Up the ante, and make everything crazier than the jerks already have made it, or defer, hand over, back off/down. Again and again and again and again and again.
It’s royally fucked up.
