What sort of man threatens a woman's life because of a lane change???
Hello my friends. Thank you so much for your genuine concern about the driver who told me last week that he would shoot me if he had a gun. You all gave a ton of helpful advice that I’m mulling over to decide the best route to go in addressing this. I’m not sure if you recall, but last year I posted about another man who lunged at my SUV striking it with his water bottle, spat in my car window and then hit me with the water bottle on my left arm when I attempted to get him out of my car window by pushing him on the chest.
I called the police. I waited 45 minutes for them to get there only to have them tell me that he says I hit him first (which I absolutely did not). His two female friends/witnesses said the same thing. Even though I also had two witnesses, my daughters were in the car, the police said I had no leg to stand on, and told me to; “forget about it, you won’t win.”
So I did nothing. I did however write a lengthy blog post about it, which was therapeutic. If you go back into my archives it was on August 8th 2016, for those of you who weren’t reading back then, if you want to read the entire account.
My point is this. As a woman, I know all too well how trying to get help often results in the exact opposite outcome. Not only do I read about it all too often, but I’ve lived it, sadly over the course of my entire life. That particular road incident was the most recent time that I did what I thought was the right thing, not allowing a bully of a man, surrounded by six young kids to get away with road rage, assault, verbal abuse and lying. But I didn’t. I won nothing at all that day. I struggle more with wondering if those kids learned anything at all about that night, than if the cops did anything to help me. The biggest reason I called the cops in the first place was so the kids would see that men should not behave this way out in the world. Not to a woman, hell, not to anybody.
Listen, I’m no angel behind the wheel. People cut me off, do stupid things all day long. It’s the way of the roads I’m afraid. Everybody is in it for themselves, in a rush, distracted, or in some cases just “new.” New to the city, new to driving, new to using their God damn brains. Whatever it is that makes for so much bad driving we’ve all been the recipient of another driver’s actions that we haven’t liked.
Do I tailgate them? No.
Do I chase them down? No.
Do I speed up, get in front of them and then slam my brakes on? No.
Do I flip the bird at the them? Yes.
Do I swear and call them names inside the confines of my own car? Yes.
Do I let it go within a matter of minutes after the offense? Yes.
And here in lies the point. I’m not saying I’m a perfect driver, or that I have the perfect reaction to things that are done to me on the road. Not at all. But, what I am is a respectful, law abiding human being of the planet. I couldn’t imagine making a mountain out of a molehill on the road, and I certainly can’t imagine anybody doing anything to me, other than harming one of my girls to get me to threaten another person’s life.
It’s just not that serious. More importantly, the state of my spirit, my energy, my attitude is worth way more to me than letting some dumb person know just how much their bad choices bothered me in that ONE MINUTE of my entire day.
Can I get an Amen.
As you know this man lives in our neighborhood, so I’m bound to see him again. In fact yesterday as I was driving by his house, returning from the market with Mikaela we saw his wife out in their front yard picking weeds. I thought for a moment to pull over and just make her aware of what her husband did. But I stopped myself, because I wondered if she would give a damn at all. My thinking on that was, she probably knows that this is exactly the sort of man she is married to, and would more than likely have zero empathy toward me, and would maybe event take the tact; “well I don’t know what you did to upset him.” I mean, we’re living in the Trump days, where women went on camera during his campaign with legit news shows to tell the women who were accusing him of assault that they were, essentially, lying. Sadly I don’t have much faith in the fact that women will have each other’s backs these days. So with all this in mind, I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to do about the video I have sitting in my phone. My smoking gun as it were.
