You can't drive if you're blind, or blind drunk, but an alarming number of Americans find themselves, at least occasionally, driving in a blind rage. "It's a major social issue," says Dr. Ricardo Martinez, administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. "A 3,000-pound car in the hands of rude, hostile person is a lethal weapon."
A report on "road rage" to be released this week by the American Automobile Association concluded that "motorists...are increasingly being shot, stabbed, and run over for inane reasons." And inanity is not confined to young louts in "Baywatch" T-shirt; young men are by far the most common perpetrators, but middle-aged men and women can be equally big jerks. The most common manifestation of road rage was aggressive tailgating, followed by headlight flashing, "obscene gestures", blocking other vehicles, and verbal abuse. Drivers have been assaulted with weapons ranging from partially eaten burritos to canes ("a favorite with the elderly and disabled") to golf clubs—and other vehicles, including buses, bulldozers, forklifts, and military tanks. "In terms of fatal crashes, drunks are a much bigger menace," says David Willis, president of the AAA Foundation of Traffic Safety. "But the average motorist doesn't encounter a drunk very often, while in a place like Washington, D.C., at least once a week you'll have an encounter with some crazy guy on the road."
Naturally, the phenomenon has given rise to its own therapeutic movement, whose leading practitioner is a Whittier, California, psychologist named Arnold Nerenburg, who calls himself "America's Road Rage Therapist", has identified four stimuli that provoked road rage. The most common is feeling endangered by someone else's driving—for example, when another driver cuts you off or follows too closely. Others are resentment at being forced to slow down, righteous indignation at someone who breaks traffic rules or steals your parking space and—perhaps the most dangerous, because it opens the door to an escalating exchange of hostilities—anger at another driver who takes his own road rage out on you.
The fact that most drivers are mutual strangers contributes to the volatility of highway confrontations. "There's a deep psychological urge to release aggression against an anonymous other," Nerenburg says.
Road-rage therapy tends toward the common-sensical—"Take a deep breath and just let it go." Nerenburg recommends. But it might help to consider that you might not be all that anonymous to the other driver. One of his patients realized the depth of his problem after he yelled an obscenity at the woman in the next car—who turned out to be his boss's wife. Which of the following statements is true according to the passage?