Sitting in fumes and anger, near panic, I wanted to get out of the car, which was impossible. I had only experienced this once before, in a hopelessly halted traffic jam in Guangzhou, China, paralyzed in traffic and yellow air, surrounded by all the angry people on this road, and a billion others behind them. They make us angry. We lash out in inappropriate, surprising ways, like Mary Jane and her pudding, like schoolboys sulking and smoking in the yard, all doing nothing. Doing anything stresses them out.
Stress is the best excuse for the common anger that rocks the world.
At almost any American intersection, the driver who pulls up to the light in the lane next to you gives you the finger or a hateful glance. The strangest progression, however, is that symptoms of those horrific war diseases are now showing up in everyday American behavior. We are not engaged in a civil war, but we seem to be moving from stress to rage. Stress is now the accepted explanation for mass shootings. The shooter du jour may be more extremely disturbed than you or your neighbor, but every time you turn on the news you expect to hear about somebody whose stress level exploded.