Eyes front. Drive like a chicken. Avoid road rage.
If you drive in the Chicago area and ever find yourself pulling up next to me at a stop light, feel free to pick your nose or chew a sandwich with your mouth open. I won’t notice.
I won’t be looking in your direction. I won’t be looking the other direction. I’ll be looking straight ahead with an expression of serenity and nonchalance.
This has been my practice for years. I stay aware of my surroundings, but I don’t acknowledge other drivers except when offering a friendly wave when they yield to me in traffic, and even then I barely glance in their direction.
Avoiding eye contact is one of the ways I avoid road rage, a topic that’s top of mind this week in the wake of the horrible altercation Tuesday between motorists on Lake Shore Drive that left a 21-month-old boy in critical condition with a gunshot wound to the head.
The degree, if any, to which eye contact — a stare down — played a role in that particular incident isn’t yet clear. Prosecutors said that the driver of the car in which the injured boy was riding took exception to how close a speeding SUV came to hitting him. He and the other driver exchanged words at the side of the road, and their argument escalated into gunfire.
But eye contact is a form of engagement, and engagement is something you always want to avoid with other drivers, particularly those who are driving poorly, as other people do.
Looking directly at another does not always convey a threat, of course, as it often does in the animal kingdom. Eye contact is how people enhance a pleasant connection during ordinary conversation or a loving encounter.
It’s one of the ways parents bond with infants.
In traffic situations, though, too often even a sidelong glance with no precipitating event carries with it the unspoken challenge, “you want a piece of me?”
A sustained glare from behind the wheel, whether at a stoplight or from car to car on parallel lanes of the expressway, is tantamount to an upraised middle finger. And what’s the best result from that? A return shrug with upstretched palms, the international gesture of apology and submission?
Other potential responses from confronted motorists range from aggressive driving — tailgating, slowing down, cutting off, even bumping or colliding — to pulling off to the side of the road for
screaming matches, fisticuffs or worse.
The provocations for such fights are usually minor. We all make mistakes behind the wheel. We merge or change lanes inappropriately, we go out of order at a four-way stop sign, we fail to signal a turn, we are too optimistic about our chances for making a yellow light.
I don’t even honk in anger at offenders anymore. If they’ve made a rare blunder they’re probably aware of it, and if they’re chronic bad drivers, a gentle reminder from me isn’t going to change their ways. In either case, their errors are almost certainly not directed at me.
How cowardly is this? Going meekly down the highways and
byways of life failing to stick up for myself or object in any way when wronged? Fearing even to look at another driver out of the worry that he will consider my very glance to be a challenge? Very.
But look. Guns are everywhere. In 2018 the Small Arms Survey conducted by the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland, estimated that, in the United States, there were 121 guns in circulation in the United States for every 100 residents.
And since then gun sales have risen dramatically — up 40% in 2020 over 2019; up 64% in January of this year over the previous January.
The odds might not be good that the person in the next car has a pistol under the seat, but they’re far from zero and growing all the time. The feeling of invulnerability you may have while cocooned behind a locked car door is an illusion against the reality of a bullet.
It’s hard to imagine a transgression of vehicular etiquette so egregious that it would justify risking your life or the lives of your passengers to address it.
Avoiding eye contact is a staple of suggestions found online for avoiding getting into road rage altercations.
“Tap your horn if you must (but no long blasts with accompanying hand gestures),” adds AAA. “Don’t respond to aggression with aggression. If you feel you are at risk, drive to a public place such as a police station, hospital or fire station . ... If you are confronted, stay as calm and courteous as possible.”
Two hotheads make an explosion in which everyone is likely to get burned one way or another.
So keep cool. Slough off the slights. And whatever you’re doing in the next car over, don’t mind me.
Re: Tweets
The winner of this week’s reader poll to select the funniest tweet, lightly edited for publication, was “Therapist: So, picking up where we left off, you said you feel like a whiny idiot. Patient: I never said that. Therapist: Oops, my notes,” by @AmishPornStar1.
The poll appears at chicagotribune.com/zorn where you can read all the finalists. For an early alert when each new poll is posted, sign up for the Change of Subject email newsletter at chicagotribune.com/newsletters.
Join me and the other regular panelists every week on The Mincing Rascals, a news-review podcast from WGN-plus that posts Thursday afternoons.