The holiday season just seems to bring out the worst in people. Did you read about the poor man who was trampled to death in a Long Island, NY, Walmart? That's right. On Black Friday, people were just sooo anxious to spend as little money as possible that they lined up before 5 am, started getting antsy and angry and when the doors opened, they trampled an employee to death on their ways towards those all-important bargains in Electronics and whatever other useless items they don't need.
But that isn't the point. The point is that ever since Bush has instituted his policy of "The Rules Don't Apply To Me (or My Minions)", Americans of the less-intelligent, less-humanistic, less-inclined-to-care-about-anyone-else-in-the-first-place stripe have been taking their cues from him.
Case in point: at a Manhattan Beach, CA, Target, I espied an angry woman with a sheepish-looking husband in tow. In the passenger seat. As I walked to my car, I saw her on another aisle and a man who saw I was leaving decided to claim my soon-t0-be-vacant spot. He dutifully turned on his blinking lights and began the wait. I loaded my items and as I shut my trunk, I saw the angry woman driving up towards me. She saw me leaving and then turned on her light. I then saw the man who had been waiting point to her, himself and then my spot. Which triggered a spate of obscene gestures. He then pointed at her, himself and my spot. I added my two cents by nodding an ascent. She then decided to include me in the obscenities, but of course, as she passed, she didn't have the courage to actually look at me--she could only do this at a distance. Nor did she look at the man waiting for my spot.
And a year ago, I was actually run into a wall along PCH near Malibu because someone was impatient with me driving the speed limit. It was right out of some C-movie, this enormous truck of the type that people buy because they feel inadequate in other ways, was tailgating me. I was in the slow lane and at 9 at night, it wasn't like PCH was particularly crowded. Plenty of room and two other lanes for this person to drive in. But no. He decided it was better to flash his brights. At a stoplight, I figured, okay, now he'll finally move over. And he did. Once we started again, he decided that he wanted to teach me a lesson. He literally drove into my lane. Along a certain stretch, near Pacific Palisades, there is a retaining wall to keep the hill from turning into a mud river during rainy season. And there was just no place for me to go. So I jammed into the wall. I couldn't believe it. I was pregnant at the time, too. So that was particularly fun for me. When he realized what he'd done, of course he sped off and the police said there was nothing they could do. Of course not.
This aren't the only examples of aggression by people whom we are led to believe by the media are model citizens, i.e. they're white. In Cape Cod three years ago, I recall driving around the various towns and seeing stickers that said "Kill the French" simply because they think, rightly so, that our Imperialist Invasion of Iraq was wrong. I guess it's okay to kill, maim, or otherwise be aggressive towards anyone who disagrees with us. Must be nice to be Conservative and have such a simplistic, and yet terrorizing, view of the world.
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