Note from the Editor:
This article was kindly written for the SDC by member @Doctor Alan.

As I’ve gotten older, I seem to have developed quite a dismal view of my fellow man, not in all cases, but too many to count. I call it ‘simmering anger’. It’s been with us since homo sapiens first crawled out of the primordial ooze, and nothing seems able to stop it. We think of ourselves as ‘civilised’ and ‘better than animals’, but scratch the surface of modern man and you’ll far too often discover the caveman beneath. People say that this is ‘human nature’, but I don’t think it has to be. Here are some examples of the manifestation of this ‘simmering anger’.



Road Rage:

We’re all aware of this, and some of us have been on the receiving end. You could be driving along quite peacefully, and a young teenager, probably still on ‘P’ plates, drives up closely behind you, tailgating, sounding his horn and making gestures you can see in your rear-view mirror. You may decide that, to avoid aggravating this moron, you’ll pull over and let him pass. On the other hand, you may be the sort of person who resents this type of behaviour, and you deliberately slow down. He can’t pass, and you can see he gets even more annoyed. Whatever you do, his ‘rage’ probably won’t go away and will eventually result in a bad accident. Your best bet is the first option – get out of his way! Road rage also probably results if you take 5 microseconds too long to pull away at the lights, or take too long to reverse-park into a small space. At parking stations, you might not be familiar with the particular ticket vending machine and find the fellow behind you resents the extra 15 seconds you’ve stolen from his incredibly important and busy day.



‘Karma’ is very unfairly distributed, and a small part of you might find yourself feeling cheated if the bloke that overtook you and the truck in front over a double line, doesn’t end up wound around a tree! Now that part of you is the Neanderthal, trying to get out! It’s called ‘human nature’, but I believe it’s the source of all the awful and senseless conflict we experience in the world, and I, for one, really try to rise above it, because we’re sometimes not very nice people, deep down, are we?

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