It seems to me that Americans these days are an angry lot. We don’t eat right, we marinate in our own fat on our couches and we don’t get enough sleep. And if that weren’t bad enough, we’ve got acid reflux disease to compromise any transient moment when we mistakenly think nothing is wrong with us.
Then we get on the road and we don’t know how to behave. Here in New York, we never did. In New York, if you can’t ride someone’s tail while simultaneously honking, cursing and giving some idiot pedestrian the finger, you need to go back where you came from, hayseed. (Mind you, not every NY driver does this, but we could, baby, we could.)
So it doesn’t surprise me to hear of the story a young military mom who got busted for throwing a “McMissle” into the car of another driver who cut her off for the second time on Interstate 95. The woman had a pregnant sister and three whiny kids in the car. If you ask me, the other car was lucky she wasn’t throwing bullets. First lesson here: carry pregnant woman or carry kids. Never, ever both.
Granted the McMom should have held her Mctemper. But how could a jury of reasonable people have sentenced her to TWO YEARS in prison over such nonsense? Even the people in the McIced car were shocked at the outcome. Even though the judge changed the sentence to probation, here’s what bothers me about this situation: when did we as a nation become so willing to punish each other over every minor thing?
Couldn’t someone understand this McMom’s frustration, give her some service project that would allow her to reflect on what she’d done (and get away from those kids) for a hot minute and do someone else some good in the meantime? Does it not occur to anyone beside me that throwing the woman in jail is an even bigger overreaction to poor circumstances than the McMom throwing the ice after being cut off a second time was? Two wrongs (or overreactions) don’t make a right. They just make us all look silly.
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*My son’s answer to the question, “Do two wrongs make a right?” Yes, he was smacked upside the head for that, but with love, you know, with love.
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