I can't bear to watch

As we were driving home from the airport last night, a driver in front of us, in a left turn lane, elected to turn right across both lanes. Fortunately we were well behind him so we were not endangered by his foolishness, but we couldn't help remarking upon it.

I made some remark about stupid drivers -- I don't remember what I said -- but my husband's response was "I guess I'm not a very aggressive driver." It seemed odd to me, and a bit of a non-sequitur, not to mention patently untrue -- he does come from New Jersey, after all! So I questioned him: "What do you mean? You're certainly a more aggressive driver than I am."

To his credit, he was exhausted, having been up since 4 am our time, and had been traveling most of the day. "I guess that's not what I meant. I think I was trying to say I expect drivers to do foolish things, and I don't get angry about it."

"Ah," I said, "You don't do road rage."

"That's it," he agreed, "I don't do road rage."

Well of course not, I thought. One needs, I think, to be pretty angry, and/or have some fairly serious entitlement issues, to really do road rage right. And anger and entitlement are just not a part of his character.

Which, I think, makes him different from almost every candidate running for almost every office that's up for election today. It seems to me that these races have seen more negative advertising, more vitriol and venom and downright hatred than any election in my memory.

I can SEE running an aggressive campaign: aggressively championing human rights, or changes to tax laws, or an end to the war in Iraq. I can understand aggressive positioning of a candidate, spending whatever it takes to increase visibility and spread the message.

But the personal attacks and the blatant lies smack of pure self-absorbed rage, and they horrify me. It seems like every candidate is looking to depict his opponent as the personification of evil, and every candidate is determined to hold that evil up for all to see. And though I understand that it is Medusa, the classical symbol of hatred and rage, who was supposed to turn her beholders to stone, the fact is that at this point all these self-appointed Perseuses, so proudly displaying their wares, leave me stone cold as well: the only evil they successfully hold up is their own.

And if the people of this country who choose to buy into this nastiness end up outnumbering those who do not, then, well -- that's what our country has chosen.

And why would we be surprised? We are the same country who chose GW Bush twice; we are the same country who went to war in Iraq; we are the same country whose economy has gone to hell in a handbasket primarily due to our own relentless greed; we are the same country whose food supply has grown huge, yet at the same time fattening and nutritionless thanks to our desperate quest for more, bigger, sooner.

The way Perseus managed to kill Medusa was by looking at her reflection in the mirror of his shield. I suspect that the only way we will be able to destroy this greedy, hateful aspect of our national psyche will be to see it mirrored in our ads and our choices. I'd like to think that could happen now, before the election, that the country will rise up in disgust and declare an end to all this. And I think that those of us who dare to hope Obama might win are daring to hope that that sort of massive change, a shift in direction from self-absorption to compassion, could be possible.

But the fact is that it's also possible that the majority of the country needs four more years of this nastiness to really learn its lesson. And frankly the thought of watching this process, of waiting for the decisions at the end of the day, and of that possible outcome turns me to stone. I am petrified. And I can hardly bear to look.