Serious Road Rage

Just saw this on the RTE news site..

A 55-year-old man will appear in court today in connection with a road rage incident which left a woman with a fractured skull.

I'm not sure I want to even know what he did.

What gets into the heads of people who "suffer" from road rage? Where did these people learn to behave like this behind the wheel of a car?

I'm not sure I buy the idea that people just snap, like in that Michael Douglas movie. That's a convenient excuse perhaps for poor snap judgement and a poor choice of action.

I'm reminded of the section in Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink! where he described the incident where Amadou Diallo, an innocent man, was shot dead by police without any just cause. Gladwell describes what has since been learned about what exactly went through the minds of the police officers and how it built to what they thought to be the "best" choice of response, to shoot.

Sometimes adrenaline and the other components of our brain-body physiology make us do stuff in an instant that we regret forever. Most of the time these bad decisions are no so serious, other times they are fatal.

Fracturing someone's skull because of some road-rage incident.

That's just mental.

Literally :-)