Befuddled and Perplexed

Musings

I have two unconnected thought patterns this week. They are incongruous but are occupying my thoughts at the same time. First, I am totally befuddled as to why we are bothering with a debate by 2 presidential candidates who have little appeal to the American public. They are going to have a staged debate with each other before either one has been nominated by his party. We already know what both of them stand for and their basic positions. It is just a contest of name calling to see if someone can get the final and better jab at the other person in a midsummer television production. It seems to have no purpose other than to satisfy the Washington politicians and the television networks that are looking for events to stage since they are struggling to sell advertising.

At the same time I am perplexed by what appears to me to be an ever increasing problem on our nations roads. With great regularity I find other drivers of motor vehicles and trucks racing to get where they're going and tailgating behind the person in front of them. It is as if they interpret they are  driving safely as long as they haven't hit the car in front of them. Keep right on top of them, as long as you don't hit them.  Go ahead and get every last inch of distance towards where you are going even if it won't get you there any faster. I'm perplexed.

Contemplations

First let us contemplate this needless debate scheduled for midsummer 2024. It is an election year and not being able to contemplate anything else in the world the news media is endlessly trying to come up with something to say about the presidential election this year. The trouble with commenting on the election is the incumbent president has been there for four years and indeed has been a Washington politician since the early 70s. Thus he has been around talking to us politically for 50 years. We pretty much know what he says  and how he acts. The other party to the debate has already been president once and, according to the experts that nominate people for such categories, Donnie is listed  the worst president we ever had. That seems to be repeated and understood by a large portion of the population except  for the people that seem to like Mr. Donald no matter what he says or does, apparently as an extension of the mediocre TV show in which he starred as himself firing people from their jobs.

The debaters have an entourage of political advisors who have been feeding them the same positions and information now for a number of years and they are simply going to repeat that and try to get digs at each other during the debate. It is hard to understand why this has any purpose. It is like rerunning an old soap opera that has already been on TV for a decade or more. In this case multiple decades. However it is scheduled and  I don't have anything else to say about the debate except that I doubt it's worth watching, I won't watch it and I wish our political parties could come up with something better than this pair of candidates for us to choose between. This shows the decrepitness of the two parties and the need for a third party.

I don't drive an excessive amount. I do most of my driving in a metropolitan area and a lot of it is in residential portions of that city. Periodically I am on the interstate to go a distance over 10 miles. What I am perplexed by is the driving habits that seemed to prevail on the roads today. What befuddles me is drivers speeding to get wherever they are going, as fast as they can, regardless of the traffic. Worse, that pattern of driving seems to be increasing. The speeding and tailgating seems to be getting worse and worse. In the last couple weeks I've had the cars behind me: swerve to avoid hitting me when I stopped for a pedestrian, pull over into the middle of the road when there were only two lanes and speed away to try and not only get ahead of me but to beat the car coming from the other direction, pull over on the shoulder to try and get by my car so they could zoom ahead. In each of these instances I was driving at approximately the speed limit. However, if you're going 25 miles an hour in a 25 mile an hour zone people seem to think they should be going 35 or more so they can get somewhere faster.

This pattern of driving puts them right on the back of my car, tailgating if you will, and putting me and them in a position to have an accident if anything should cause me to slow down.

 It can actually be humorous as these cars finally pass you because they love to shout at you and or flip you the bird to note that you're going too slow because you're not speeding. As I watch these drivers behavior they don't seem to pay any attention to how fast they would get actually get somewhere. For example if I am going to speed limit and there is a red light ahead but I have left some amount of distance between myself and the car in front of me they will pull around to get in front of me to get right behind that car and come to a stop at the red light as I pull up to beside them to wave at them. They ignore whether or not they are going anywhere by closing down that distance to the car in front of them where there is a red light in front of them. They seem to simply have a need to make sure there is no distance left between them and the car in front of them or the light in front of them. It is a pattern of driving made for accidents.

Thoughts

On these two disparate topics I have simple thoughts.

We should not be having the debate. It's probably too late to cancel it. I hope they cancel the next debate later in the fall. It has little or no potential to be meaningful. Our political parties and this campaign are at their worst with this year's effort. We have always complained that the elections are too long and here we are staging a debate before either party has even nominated a candidate! This really is senseless.

I doubt anyone will start driving slower and leave more space between themselves and the car in front but I would hope that at least a few people will stop and think that their effort to run right up on  to the tailgate in front of them, or up to the red light, really accomplishes nothing and at some point in time can actually lead to an accident. I will just have to keep having that wish and hoping a little bit of it comes true.

Silence Dogood

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