Quote: (06-04-2016 02:59 AM)godzilla Wrote:
How dare you be so judgemental. Dude was like 17 at the time. He'll grow out of it.
Dammit. Here's the kind of Dad Lecture I didn't want to give enough that I've got to back off of this forum, because who am I to tell anyone what to do?
Listen or ignore, your choice.
A vehicles a dangerous weapon, son. You add aggression and panic into the mix and a bunch of people can easily get killed over if someone isn't paying attention just for one split second because they're terrified of someone chasing them or they were angrily-focused on
making someone pay.
A second is all it takes.
I've directly seen enough accidents and road death over the years - including how people go into shock, including myself, no matter how OK you think you are; what remained of friends after the fact; and an older friend who is still racked with guilt and grief of the deaths he caused twenty-five years after the fact - to be as weary of avoidable bullshit over bullshit ego wounding and as damn judgmental as I want.
Back before mobile phones, I once saw a car race up behind a pickup and overtake, only for the pickup to immediately accelerate, race right up the bumper, and run the car off the road. Truck keeps going, I stop to see if they're ok. Turns out their son is turning blue on the back seat and they were racing him to the hospital. What's it matter though, that Pickup Driver sure taught those peasants to respect their King.
A female friend, after I catch up with her car and find her stopped in the middle of the road, wandering around, dazed, with the front of the engine crushed in and a giant kangaroo half through her front windshield: "I'm ok." Blood trickling down her head. I come forward to guide her off the centre of the road. She slaps me away, wide-eyed and agitated. "No really, I'm fine. I didn't hit my head." Ghostly-white, she passes out in my arms. A long, horrible wait checking her breathing, pulse and keeping her legs elevated until the next car came past and they could go find a farmhouse to call an ambulance.
I know another woman whose entire family was killed when a bunch of teenagers overtook her car on a dangerous stretch and didn't see another car coming, then swerved back in front of her. One split second decision at the wrong time and her husband and children were taken from her. Even worse, any time someone else dies on that road, the media hounda her for comment, even though she's always said she wanted to be left alone, and has even
begged them.
I've got a younger mate who drinks heavily since he lifted a young girl out a burning car wreck only for her head to fall completely off. The decapitation was that sudden and clean that the weight of the head held the blood in place.
This is the knowledge age and experience weighs a man down with.
Your mate's age is no excuse - his Daddy should have taught him to respect his vehicle the way he'd respect a gun.
Quote:Quote:
Can you explain how you trained girlfriends out of what behavior? I could use some help for my friend
For women? For being spoilt brats on the road? Usually empathy. Most women's queen bitch behaviour can be modified by getting them to put themselves in the other persons shoes, (though, unfortunately, this is often used to excuse bad behaviour). You want to hit the classic sweet spot of dialed down moral sanctimony without going into outright lecturing: keep the tone casual, conversational, with a hint of humour.
"So, you've never pulled out in front of a car when you thought you had more time than you did?"
"You don't know what sort of day they're having. Maybe they're driving home trying to just hold it together just long enough so that no-one sees them cry, and annoying you isn't even registering with them. Boy, you're showing them."
Though light mockery works just as well:
"Do you think you're that important that random strangers deliberately-target you for persecution?
Interesting."
[roll down window, yell loudly] "Make way for her royal majesty, scum!" [look back at her] "What? It's what you're thinking, isn't it?"
For men?
Tell him straight to stop being a dickhead and to let trivial shit go. Get him out of his own head. There are greater challenges for a man to endure in life than someone cutting him off.
It's complicated, I know. A powerlifter mate of mine has some Gamma Issues. Unfortunately, these kind of resentments consume him:
why don't people realise that I'm better than them? He still carries on about some guy who works at one of the pubs who once cut us off in traffic
a couple of years back. I can't imagine carrying such unnecessary emotional baggage like that around for so long that you're still seething over a minor slight all that time later - it sounds like a hellish existence - but I take his Gamma side into account with patience due to the knowledge that he was abandoned on a stranger's doorstep as a baby, was raised by the state and his parents have never sought him out after 45 years.
All he's really saying with his Gamma Sperg-Outs is "Why don't people care about me?" Maybe your mate has similar issues. He needs to work on getting his house in order rather than acting out his self-worth issues on the road.
Be safe out there.