MUSINGS

Don’t Just Sit There — Honk Your Horn

The other day I took an Uber ride to a restaurant where I was meeting some friends for lunch. The driver, who I’ll call Evan, and I started talking about where we came from. I told him that I had been born and raised in Houston. Evan mentioned that he was born and grew up in Manhattan. He added that he had lived in several other places — Seattle, San Francisco, Colorado — but the weirdest place of all had been Seattle.

To him, living in Seattle was like living “on an alien planet.” I found this rather fascinating, so I asked him why. He told me the following story. The story explained a lot about the incomprehensible behavior and attitudes I have observed of people who live in the coastal Northwest states, especially in relation to the rioting that went on and might still be going on there.

Here’s the story:

Seattle has awful traffic, Evan said. He has driven in it when there was bumper-to-bumper traffic, no one going anywhere except at a crawl.

One day, Evan was parked two cars down from the first driver at a traffic light. The light went from red to green, and — nothing happened. Traffic in his lane didn’t move forward.

Irritated, Evan looked at the driver in front of him. That person seemed fine. Then he looked at the drive at the front of the line, at the intersection. That driver’s head was lowered. To Evan it looked as if that driver had his face in his phone. Seconds passed. The driver at the intersection continued looking at his phone, dozing, or whatever.

The light turned red.

Evan rolled his eyes and waited. The light turned green again, finally, and — still, nothing happened. The car in front never moved. No one did a thing. Evan stared about him in incredulity. Not a single person honked their car horn. That would never happen in New York! No one rolled down their window and shouted, “Hey, asshole! Get a move on!” No one even got out of their car to check on the first driver in line, to see if he needed medical attention; they just sat in their cars behind him and waited.

The light turned red once more. Again, Evan sat through it, amazed at what he was witnessing.