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…