a car ride that involved my wallet on the roof<\/a> and other similar incidents or near incidents, it’s become painfully, odoriferously clear that our children do not deal well with curves unless they’re asleep.\u00c2\u00a0 The 90-minute drive to another family with young kids in particular without fail involves whining, stopping, and fresh air.\u00c2\u00a0 So this time we planned it with stops for fresh air, and plenty time for the drive.\u00c2\u00a0 And as I drove little old lady style around a bend, I realized that if the folks behind me were anything like my younger, childless self, they’d be muttering under their breaths about how some people just don’t know how to handle a car.<\/p>\nMy younger self, for whatever reason, rarely if ever came up with another reason for slow driving than incompetence.\u00c2\u00a0 Kids close to throwing up?\u00c2\u00a0 Nope.\u00c2\u00a0 Spouse afraid of the drop-off?\u00c2\u00a0 Nope.\u00c2\u00a0 Distracted by a fight in the car or a fight before the drive?\u00c2\u00a0 Petrified because of a recent accident?\u00c2\u00a0 Weary and looking for a hotel after a long drive?\u00c2\u00a0 Nope, nope, nope.\u00c2\u00a0 Clearly below-average drivers, the lot of them.\u00c2\u00a0 Mutter mutter puddlebrains.<\/p>\n
So, really, the reason most everyone else is a below average driver lies with me and my lack of imagination.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s simply easier to assume incompetence than to exercise my imagination to come up with a reason for that strange driving.\u00c2\u00a0 Without imagination, no empathy; without empathy, mutter mutter puddlebrains.\u00c2\u00a0 With my imagination engaged, on the other hand, empathy comes easily.<\/p>\n
It scares me to see how easily I default into that assumption of incompetence, how lazy my imagination is.\u00c2\u00a0 It scares me even more to see how widespread a problem it is in the political arena.\u00c2\u00a0 We avoid the work of empathizing and instead assume ignorance and deploy sarcasm.\u00c2\u00a0 Witness the discussion around Brendan Eich’s resignation.\u00c2\u00a0 Witness, also, how roughly the same people who support the NSA gathering plenty of intelligence on US residents vehemently oppose intelligence gathering in connection with gun control, and conversely those that support gun control loudly protest the government listening to our phone calls.\u00c2\u00a0 Not only do they fail to see the tension between the positions they themselves hold, but they utterly fail to see how the people they denigrate actually share some of their most pressing concerns – albeit in the context of another political question.<\/p>\n
I’m convinced that the prescription for both road rage and political rage is empathy, and I think I’ll start by giving my imagination workouts every time I’m tempted by an apparently lousy driver to mutter mutter puddlebrains.\u00c2\u00a0 With any luck, that’ll also make me a calmer, better driver myself.<\/p>\n
Any other ideas on how to slowly build up the imagination and empathy muscles?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
You know the people: it’s green, and they don’t move; they suddenly slow down to turn without using their blinker; they pass you, only to slow to a lower speed than yours; they slow down more than necessary for curves and crawl around roundabouts; they tailgate you and flash their highbeams even though you’re doing five above the limit.\u00c2\u00a0 You know the people.\u00c2\u00a0 And you might have wondered: why are there so many below average drivers?\u00c2\u00a0 Not necessarily dangerous drivers, but drivers who don’t think ahead, and don’t consider others, for all you can tell. Why, indeed?\u00c2\u00a0 I don’t think I ever gave it much thought until I applied my, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,35],"tags":[37,41,39,40,38],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/850"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=850"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/850\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":851,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/850\/revisions\/851"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}