Eric Peters from The Burning Platform:
I was driving home – well, trying to drive home – on a stretch of Blue Ridge Parkway that is being resurfaced. Since most people apparently can no longer negotiate a work zone on their own, cannot manage driving on the travel lane not being worked on – despite abundant visual evidence, such as cones and men working on the other travel lane – it has become necessary to shuttle the backed-up cars through the work area under the guidance of a Pilot Car. No more waving cars through the zone on the expectation that a driver can – ought to be able to – deal with such a thing without guidance.
So, the cars stack up and wait – twice.
First, they bunch up at the entrance to the work zone, where a human drone stands there holding a Stop! sign .. the cars bunch up. They wait. Not to go – but for the Pilot Car (which is actually a truck) to return from herding the cars bunched up waiting at the other end of the work zone through the work zone ..
Eventually, the Pilot Truck comes, turns around – slowly – and positions itself at last at the head of the conga line. We are finally ready to proceed. Except some are not. For some, it is too much to even follow a Pilot Truck with flashers on gimping along at less than 25 MPH.
The car I was behind on this day.
It was too challenging, apparently, to keep up with the Pilot Truck. It receded into the distance – the driver apparently not noticing he was losing his tail. Shortly, he disappeared completely. I found myself behind this full-flowered Clover whose BMW sport sedan must have had holes in the floorpans, because it was moving about as fast as you’d expect if being pushed by his feet, Fred Flintstone style…
This seems to attract a new type of driver – aka, meatsack. One who prefers machines which drive themselves as much as technically possible.
Anyhow, the BMW ahead was holding everyone up even more than the Pilot Truck idiocy. The pilot Truck was already in the next county. So I did a thing which almost no one does anymore…
YES! Been there done that. Waiting at a light in front of the police station where a bad sensor at the railroad crossing kept the light red. Cars had refused to move through the light after stopping (common sense right?) and I had a van load of kids in the car taking them to school. (a conversion van, so I am dating myself).
So I went in the left turn lane past two lanes of stopped cars .. stopped at the solid red traffic light .. and RIGHT IN FRONT of a police car that was there (no, he did not get out of the car to direct traffic) .. and then proceeded right through the light while all the other drivers just watched in disbelief.
I passed the BMW.
This stunned everyone. The person in the BMW, of course – and also the other 15 or 16 cars stacked up behind the BMW. Not one of which followed my example. Despite all of them clearly annoyed and expressing their annoyance via tailgating the car ahead. You could feel them fuming, almost – but not one of them made a move.
As Spock would say, fascinating!
It – and similar social experimenting – reveals the degree to which most people are browbeaten rule-obeyers incapable of exercising any initiative behind the wheel. Who wait resignedly to be told what to do and where to go. If Authority does not do so, then they are baffled.
Since no one told them to pass the BMW and passing was probably illegal, too – notwithstanding that doing so was both reasonable and safe – they wouldn’t. Not couldn’t.
Wouldn’t.
This paralysis of initiative is the defining attribute of the modern American driver. Even more so than his learned incapacity. He is beaten. Submissive to the extent that it no longer oppresses him because he no longer realizes he is oppressed. He has been habituated to it. He even venerates it.
In support of that assertion, note the outrage which often follows when a non-meatsack (a few still exist) seizes the initiative and passes our man in the BMW, or anything like that.
There is an angry flashing of the high beams, accompanied by equally furious laying on of the horn. Clover is angered, at last! One senses that – if they could get their hands on the offender – they would see him burned at the stake.
It is the same mentality – the same duality – which existed in the Middle Ages and in Soviet Russia and other such places, which the U.S. increasingly resembles. Cringing submission before Authority, terrified to do anything which might offend the Authority . . . yin yanged by savage adulation when a heretic is caught and punished by Authority for affronting it.
Society has lost it. The ability to deal with a situation out of the norm and act wisely and smartly. Today’s surfs are willing to just sit and wait to be told what to do.