I was crossing Claiborne, with a green light, and after looking out into traffic and deciding to go, Some jackass switched lanes and whipped around the corner. I don't normally get flustered by fast things, or big things-- I rather enjoy skydiving-- but this was a matter of a second, or about eighteen inches, depending on how you want to look at it. Now, I know for a fact that it is illegal to make a right turn on red without coming to a complete stop first. I got in trouble on my driving test for doing exactly that. So feeling the car rush past, not very fucking far behind my back leg, really pissed me off, and set my adrenaline off for the next fifteen minutes.

This is the third fucking time this week.

I'm sure there are some good drivers out there. I try to be very safe on the one or two occasions a year that I actually drive a car (much to the chagrin of whatever hurried soul is behind me). But Jesus Fuck. Please.

Hey! Use your turn signal when you're in a car, so everybody around you can figure out in which direction you're aiming (poorly, likely) your one-tonne steel projectile. It can possibly save lives, or prevent wrecks.

Oh yeah, it's illegal not to, as well.

Now why the fuck does it bother me? I've spent the last ten years dodging cars in third-world countries across the globe. I'm used to being a non-entity whenever I'm near fucking pavement. But come on. Land of the Free and home of the Brave. We're always fucking talking about how superior our society is, but we still manage to fucking plow down pedestrians like everybody else. We're better educated as a whole than the majority of the world, but we still can't fucking turn on our blinkers when we're revving our engines at intersections.

So yeah, a friend of mine was hit by another car on I-10 last week and killed. From what I hear, it was an SUV, against which his Japanese compact had a snowflake's chance in hell surviving. Cars are sort of like weapons of mass destruction. They get bigger, louder, and more dangerous (to us, and those around us) perpetually, like we're striving to crush each other with our massive metaphorical penises, but the morality hasn't really caught up. How long has this society been driving cars? Close to 100 years, right? A fucking century. And we still have terrible, deadly auto-ettiquete. When I lived in the Middle East, and they had really only been driving for 30 years or so (as a culture), they had an excuse. Sort of. Car culture takes time to develop, and until it does, pop the clutch at your own peril, right? But here in the U.S. of A.? It's fucking disgusting how little respect people have for the fact that they are piloting very potentially lethal engines of fucking carnage. Cars are far more dangerous than guns statistically, I would expect. But few people seem to even think of that when they drive every day.

Oh, yeah. And this whole war in Iraq thing? If half of car owners rode bikes, or if people took public transportation when they weren't traveling between townships or something, do you think we'd be killing rag-heads left and right under the guise of liberation? Does anybody at all think that "freeing those God-fearing (albeit not --my-- God) citizens from the tyranny of this evil, evil man" was really at the top of George Bush's list for reasons to go to war? Has that ever been a reason that has started a war of foreign aggression, ever?