In This Episode: One of the This is True mantras is ‘Think first, react later …if at all.’ But what does that really mean, and how can we learn something from an example of doing it ‘wrong’?

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* No links for this one, but a comment: the reason I was watching traffic so closely when I was walking downtown is because a couple of years ago, I would see multiple news articles about pedestrians in crosswalks being run down in Denver — and then the driver took off. Sometimes I’d see 2-3 in a week! I finally was able to talk to a Denver cop and ask why. His answer: because the penalty for felony hit-and-run were lighter than for drunk driving resulting in death, so they just took their chances. Yikes!

Transcript
I just got back from a road trip, and seeing someone in a sort-of road rage incident made me roll my eyes — and consider how it could have been different had that driver taken just a few seconds to think, rather than react.
Welcome to Uncommon Sense. I’m Randy Cassingham
Spending several days in downtown Denver brought some good food, good friends, and bad drivers. Not all of them, of course. In fact, most were fine drivers — I was watching — but it’s the bad ones that stand out, right? As I was waiting to cross a street, I saw the light for the traffic go yellow, and a driver decided to stop a little sharply. She might have made it into the intersection before it went red, but stopped instead.
But she wasn’t the bad driver: the guy behind her was. He not only thought the first car could have gotten through, he thought he could have blown through too! If he had, he definitely would have gone through a red light. But that isn’t where it ended. As he screeched to a halt pretty much right in front of me, I heard him yelling, “Oh come ON!” — he was mad at the first car for stopping; I could hear him clearly because his window was down. And then for good measure he flipped off the driver who stopped. And then the piece de resistance: a little more quietly, he said, “god damned women!” — and that told me a lot.
“You are the problem here,” I said to the guy, “not her.” I purposefully made eye contact and, once that was accomplished, I turned away as I got to the far side of the crosswalk. I couldn’t see him flip me off, but I did hear him curse me. I didn’t react at all, I just kept walking, and his light went green and he took off.
The other thing I noticed is that his car had several dents, apparently from hitting things. This wasn’t the sort of guy who learns quickly.
Long-time This is True fans will label this situation correctly: the guy didn’t think, he reacted. But what does that really mean? What lessons can we take away from this brief interaction that happens pretty much every hour, in pretty much every city, pretty much every day? Or to put it another way, what would a thinking person in his position have done instead?
Let’s analyze the situation a little bit, which does means making a few assumptions that are likely correct, even if I can’t prove it. I mean, he could be a full-time jerk who blows through stale yellows all the time, but let’s give him the benefit of the doubt, and assume he was simply late. And he was blaming the more-cautious woman in front of him for making him ev...