Don’t Let Road Rage Become Who We Are

I was driving the other day and it occurred to me that the ugliness we now see, even between friends and neighbors, looks a lot like road rage. I don’t mean the real kind where people actually get out of their cars and have physical altercations but the more common kind where suddenly a perfect stranger is reduced to a string of expletives. We dehumanize people because they cut us off, drive too slow or don’t say thank you when we let them go first. Do we ever take the time to think that maybe they are lost or just got an upsetting phone call or are just days away from their adult children taking their keys away for good? Do we ever remind ourselves that we too sometimes look at our phone at a red light and fail to notice when it has turned green (until the person behind us lets us know.) I’m not saying it’s easy to be nice when you’re in a rush and every school bus in town appears to be driving in front of you and stopping every 50 feet. But I am saying that hurling insults at people we don’t know inevitably makes things worse, even if it feels cathartic at the time.

That intolerant and often unseemly behavior that has long been contained to our cars is spilling out into the public square. There is reason to worry that we are losing our humanity and moving away from being the best version of ourselves when the words “fascist”, “socialist’ and “racist” are thrown around as if they don’t mean what they really mean. When people are labeled in the ugliest and most hyperbolic of terms because of how they choose to fill out their ballot, vitally important bonds break. Respectful and reasonable dialogue becomes impossible. 

Braver Angels is an organization that “rejects the normalization of this extreme polarization and says no to the breakdown of political and social life it brings.” They are inspired by the wordsof Abraham Lincoln, who not only called on Americans to summon the “better angels” of our nature but also to find the courage needed to pursue a more perfect union, “with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right.”

We are the answer to meeting this moment. And civility is not enough. It will take what my friend Irshad Manji calls moral courage — doing the right thing in the face of your fears. It means being able to admit out loud when the candidate you loathe does something good and criticize when they do something bad. It means standing up for truth in a sea of lies when the pressure to conform is intense, debilitating even. 

This is hard to do. It is why Lincoln deliberately chose the word “courage”. It is why an organization once named “Better Angels” changed its name to “Braver Angels.” They realized that bravery is an essential component for depolarization and unity.

There is something better within all of us. Now is the time to find it, unleash it and use it to help put us back together. 

(This piece first ran here as my monthly column in my local paper, The Valley Breeze.)