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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Don’t Be A Party To Needless Tragedy

Costco parking lot. Saturday. High noon. Two cars head for the same parking place. One gets there first. The other driver explodes, pounding on his horn, shouting, shaking his fists in the air.

His children are with him. Watching. Learning.

Minutes later, on the same lot, another driver begins turning into an empty spot. A battered little junker roars out of nowhere, cuts in front of him and takes the space. The stunned motorist catches the eye of a passerby, and both burst into rueful laughter.

Hey, it’s healthier to laugh than to reach for a .357.

Road rage. It’s here. Right here in Spokane, famously known as The Great Place To Raise A Family.

One shudders to think about life in our region if the next generation of drivers follows the example of we grown-ups who sit at the steering wheels now.

Only a few years ago, red-light runners and drunks led the list of local driving problems. Surely, they do kill more people than the soccer moms on steroids who thunder down Rockwood Boulevard at 45 mph with a phone to their ear and a latte sloshing on the upholstery of their Suburbans.

However, road rage is more than a trendy kind of bad manners. In a flash, it can turn deadly. Especially here. In 1996, the Washington State Patrol tallied 1,100 traffic incidents in which a firearm was involved. In California, where the road rage trend began, the Highway Patrol tallied only 49 firearms cases during 1996.

Last Friday, a 50-year-old Boeing worker was sent to prison for shooting and wounding a 50-year-old insurance executive during a confrontation at a backed-up Seattle intersection. Last September, a 17-year-old boy got 40 years in prison for murdering another motorist in a Centralia traffic dispute. In October 1996, a passing motorist shot and killed a young mother on a Tacoma freeway.

Road rage can trap anyone - not just the stereotypical young yahoo in a pickup truck. A Michigan study found that 53 percent of aggressive drivers are women.

Experts offer lots of explanations for road rage, none more plausible than the impatience that technology - microwaves! channel surfers! cell phones! faxes! modems! faster CPUs! - has implanted in our expectations.

But none of us - not one - needs to buy into the trend. Here’s a simple solution: Imagine that the motorist in front of you is your grandmother or your pastor. Imagine that the person stepping into the crosswalk is your mom.

Be the driver who yields, the driver who chuckles, the driver who tolerates error, the driver who finds peace by opting out of the rage.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board