Todd's Cavalcade of Whimsy

Have you noticed that there seems to be a clinical "rage" affiliated with just about every facet of our lives? "Road Rage" is the granddaddy of them all, but now we have things like "Air Rage," "Cell Rage," and "Office Rage." Rage is, well, all the rage.

At first this trend sort of upset me. (Yes, I see the irony in that.) But then I started thinking: Can we blame people for being mad all the time? I mean, have you been out in public? If other people don't tick you off, I think there's really something wrong with you. More and more, it seems like other people (not you and me, of course, we're perfectly fine) think the world revolves around them, that they're encased in some sort of hermetically sealed bubble and that their actions don't affect anyone else. It's like people haven't bothered to learn any social etiquette at all.

For example, most of us know that when we're at the grocery store we're supposed to hug one side of the aisle with our shopping carts in order to allow the people streaming toward the "Ho Ho's" aisle enough room to get by. But there's always that guy who's pushing his cart smack dab down the middle of the aisle, meandering from side to side, comparing every item on the shelf for net carbs, never giving you enough room to slip by. Pretty soon it's like a bad scene out of Days of Thunder: You time it just right so when he bobs to the left you weave to the right, scraping along the side his cart, sparks flying, the little flags extending from the shelves advertising the daily specials clacking against your cart like baseball cards in a bike's spokes, a trail of Cheez-Doodle bags littering the floor behind you.

People do this on the sidewalk, too, but they often gang up to do it. We've all been there: two people just far enough apart from each other to make passing on either side an impossibility, but just close enough together to prevent any possibility of slithering in between them. You try the little "coughing alert" signal, hoping to get them to notice you, but they never pay attention to that. Heck, they don't even move for the people coming toward them. They force these poor people to paste themselves against the wall gecko-style until they've passed. I just don't get it.
These are the same people who willy-nilly cross in the middle of the street with no regard for any laws or people who are, oh I don't know, driving. My wife gets upset because I hardly slow down; she claims that pedestrians always have the right-of-way, no matter if they're in the sidewalk or not. Whether or not that is true, I really don't think we should coddle people who don't look to see if cars are coming down the street and just dart into the road like so many rabid squirrels. I mean, we teach 3-year-olds that leaping out from behind a parked car gazelle-like into the middle of the road is a bad idea -- a good near-miss is probably the best thing to show someone in their twenties the error of his ways. Remember kids: it's never too late to stop learning.

I could go on, of course (don't even get me started on how some people drive). And I'm sure we can all think of examples in our own lives. Those times where you stop and say to yourself, "Who is this person? Don't they know it's the rule that when you get in your car at the mall you don't dilly-dally with makeup or a phone call but back out as soon as possible? I know they see me waiting for them! Wait -- is she cleaning out her glove compartment?!"

We can say a lot about the deterioration of our society. But whether or not we agree on the bigger issues, it's these smaller issues that are the barometer of the decline of culture at large. After all, the fall of the Roman Empire was brought on by people who tried to smuggle 23 items into the 15-items-or-less lane at the grocery store.