The Paper • Page 2 • October 5, 2017
Road Rage Cont. from Page 1
annoyance and pressure. More cars, more people, greater speeds, less patience, and a bad day at the office can all be contributing factors for someone to “blow-off steam” while driving.
People have long used the words “road rage,” but the term gained greater popularity during a string of road rage murders and injuries which terrorized Southern California during the summer of 1987. It gained nationwide attention when Rick Bynum’s 3-year-old son was shot and killed on a Los Angeles freeway. By July 29, 1987, four more motorists were dead from road rage events, and several others had dodged bullets by mere inches. One man fired at a motorcyclist for writing down his license plate number after the motorcyclist made an illegal U-turn.
By the end of August, 1987 five people would be dead and eleven more injured in Los Angeles County. As the summer became more violent with road rage, motorists drove onto the Los Angeles freeways with greater and greater fear and anxiety. And for good reason. For the danger was a very real one.
The rash of Los Angeles shootings seemed to have no limits. Even a stuntman from the popular television show, “The Dukes of Hazzard” was shot in the arm while arguing at a traffic light. Numerous newspaper headlines and televised reports said road rage was spiraling out of control. The Los Angeles Times used descriptive words
Give Us This Day Our Daily Chuckle This week, a compendium of wit, wisdom and neat stuff you can tell at parties. Enjoy! Glasses
Yesterday my daughter e-mailed me again, asking why I didn't do something useful with my time. “Like, me sitting around the pool and drinking wine is not a good thing?” I asked. My "doing-something-useful" seems to be her favorite topic of conversation.
She was "only thinking of me," she said and suggested that I go down to the Senior Center and join something.
I did this and when I got home last night, I decided to play a prank on her.
I e-mailed her and told her that I had joined a Parachute Club.
She replied, "Mother, are you nuts? You are 78 years old and now you're going to start jumping out of airplanes?”
I told her that I even got a Membership Card and e-mailed a copy to her.
such as, “hysteria,” “terror,” “paranoia,” and went on to say that road rage violence was “an epidemic.” Los Angeles taxi cab drivers soon began asking passengers for permission to take side streets instead of driving on congested freeways. As one telecast reported, “Passengers didn’t mind paying the higher fare. They said they would rather shell out a couple extra dollars than being shot at.” Richard Balain, now 49-years-old, remembers the rash of road rage back then and how it terrorized an entire city. At the time, he was a 19-year-old pizza delivery driver and recalled: “I got goose bumps every time someone tailgated me.”
Some drivers stopped honking their car horns altogether. The phenomena escalated beyond Los Angeles that year to, literally, hundreds of road rage incidents across the state of California.
The term “road rage” was firmly established in the minds and psyche of drivers across the United States as the violence seemed to slowly spread.
HOW WIDESPREAD IS ROAD RAGE? Various studies have revealed a shocking statistic. One study conducted by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety linked 10,000 traffic accidents to driver violence. Road rage is connected to well over 200 deaths as expressed by the study’s report: “Mostly by deliberate murders conducted by angry drivers. This number has been steadily increasing at a rate of 7% each year.” The AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety examined police records across
She immediately telephoned me and yelled, "Good grief, Mom, where are your glasses?! This is a Membership to a Prostitute Club, not a Parachute Club.” I calmly replied, "Oh my, I think I'm in real trouble then, because I signed up for five jumps a week!!”
The line went quiet and her friend picked up the phone and said that my daughter had fainted. Life as a Senior Citizen is not getting any easier, but sometimes it can be a lot of fun.
Just because you're "Young" doesn't mean that you can outsmart an "old Geezer"
the United States and found an average of over 1,200 incidents of road rage per year. “This dangerous road rage level rose dramatically throughout the 6 years of the study.”
One fact-gathering by SafeMotorist.com claimed that as much as 66% of traffic fatalities are now caused by firearms, rather than just a typical accident. Retired California Highway Patrol veteran, Ken Daily of Los Angeles, says road rage is nothing new, but the behavior pattern is: “It’s nothing new, but now they have weapons.” As one close friend recently confided to me, “If I encounter an irate, aggressive motorist I just avoid eye contact and keep my distance. I don’t know what kind of weapon they might have and I just wish to get home safely to have dinner with my wife and children.”
Road rage is far more widespread – and growing – than one might imagine. According to another study released just last year, on July 14, 2016, the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety revealed that an estimated 8-million drivers admit to extreme, combative behavior behind the wheel. This report further summarizes another sobering fact, as expressed here in their own words: “Nearly 80 percent of drivers expressed significant anger, aggression or road rage behind the wheel at least once in the past year.”
Though road rage causes a relatively small percentage of overall driving deaths, this percentage is on the rise. In 2015, road-rage-related deaths were connected to almost 470 fatal crashes. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says this is an increase of nearly 500 percent in just over a 10-
That's CONFIDENCE.
We see the world suffering, but still we get married and have children. That's LOVE.
On an old man's shirt was written a sentence 'I am not 81 years old; I am sweet 16 with 65 years of experience.' That's ATTITUDE. Have a happy day and live your life like the six stories.
When I was a child, I thought nap time was punishment. Now it's like a minivacation.
Remember: Don't make old people mad. We don't like being old in the first place, so it doesn't take much to tick us off.
Today, many experts in the field view these violent, often deadly, acts of road rage as a need to re-evaluate and make revisions to more accurately categorize this abnormal behavior. It clearly is not normal by any standard of thinking for one motorist to willfully kill another driver. Surveys show that road rage is far more dangerous than many people think. And it is a situation not to be toyed with; it is a potentially-dangerous situation. One study found a startling reality:
Road Rage Cont. on Page 3
biker steps up next to me, grabs my drink and gulps it down in one swig.
"Well, whatcha' gonna do about it?" He says menacingly, as I burst into tears. "This is the worst day of my life," I say. "I'm a complete failure. I was late to a meeting, and my boss fired me. When I went to the parking lot, I found my car had been stolen, and I don't have any insurance. I left my wallet in the cab I took home. I found my wife with another man... and then my dog bit me. So I came to this bar to work up the courage to put an end to it all.
"I buy a drink, I drop a cyanide capsule in, and I sit here watching the poison dissolve .... nd then you show up and drink the whole damn thing! But, enough about me, how are you doing?" The Wednesday-night church service coincided with the last day of hunting season.
Once all villagers decided to pray for rain.
Our pastor asked who had bagged a deer.
On the day of prayer all the people gathered, but only one boy came with an umbrella.
No one raised a hand.
Puzzled, the pastor said, "I don't get it. Last Sunday many of you said you were missing because of hunting season. I had the whole congregation pray for your deer."
That's FAITH .
When you throw babies in the air, they laugh because they know you will catch them.
One hunter groaned, "Well, it worked. They're all safe."
Every night we go to bed without any assurance of being alive the next morning, but still we set the alarms to wake up.
A recent study found that women who carry extra weight live longer than men who mention it.
We plan big things for tomorrow in spite of zero knowledge of the future.
I was sitting there at the bar staring at my drink when a large, trouble-making
That's HOPE.
IS ROAD RAGE A MENTAL DISORDER? At first, the National Institute of Mental Health did not consider “road rage” as an “official” mental disorder that is formally recognized in the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Disorders (DSM).” However, this phenomena of road rage has sparked debate within the psychological community. It certainly cannot be considered normal for a driver to purposely shoot another driver dead, or to willfully commit vehicular murder by running over a motorcyclist, to cite just two examples. Nor would the behavior of actor, Jack Nicholson, violently bashing-in the roof and windshield of a person’s automobile with a golf club, be considered just a “normal lapse of acceptable behavior.”
Hunting Prayer
"SIX LITTLE STORIES"
That's TRUST.
year span. Also, road rage events which involve firearms have more than doubled to over 600 cases documented last year, in 2016. From just a 3-year span, from 2014 to 2016, 136 people were killed by firearms from other motorists.
A Hell of a Day
Things to think about
If you attempt to rob a bank you won't have any trouble with rent/food bills for the next 10 years, whether or not you are successful.
Chuckles Cont. on Page 11