Justice missed my bumper |4:21 PM|
I was rear-ended without damage to my car for the second time this past week. The first time wasn't worth mentioning on its own. It was just one of those mornings where every single person is apparently tired, at work, at the grocery store, everyone looks just like you feel. Dead tired. I was stuck at a light and I guess the woman behind me dozed off and drifted into my car. No damage, but it woke me up enough to get to work safely, didn't even need to stop for that one.
Where was I going with this? Ah, avoidance. I was sitting a light, this time at about 5:30pm, and my car shuddered. For a second I thought something had gone wrong with the engine until I looked through the rear-view and notice the Lexus behind me was much closer than it should be. The light changed, a stuck an arm out the window signalling the other driver into a nearby parking lot.
I'm fully in favor of folks over the age of 55 or so being given yearly driving tests. The guy that plowed through an open air market in San Fransciso made this a brief but widespread debate. The problem is that the elderly as a group vote more than just about any other age range. They're a powerful political force, and so no politician is going to commit career Seppeku by proposing we take the keys away from Nanna and Grampy, even when they can't quite count their legs anymore.
The gentleman that got out of the (oh so very nice) Lexus was a dottering old man. Not so dottering that I shouldn't have let him leave the parking lot, but cotton brained enough that he'd let his car pop mine on the ass. I saw no damage to the bumper, said "No harm, no foul!" and gave a thumbs up. The old guy babbled something quietly, agreed that there shouldn't be any damage at that speed, and headed back to his car.
While I was giving the thumbs up, a debate was raging in my head. "Should I press this issue? There's no damage to my car, but this guy may not belong on the road. If I give him trouble for this accident, someone, be it the cops, his insurance company, or his relatives, might just have gramps take a test to see if he should be driving anymore. How likely is it that anything positive would come of me getting our respective insurance companies involved? Not very. Well, that's a nice car, if I sued his ass for whiplash and sexual dysfunction as a result of the accident, I'd be sitting pretty. Criminy how horrid."
At about this point I'd gotten back into my car. Only a few seconds had passed but I'd gone from defending my political stance of the elderly being tested, to cost benefit analysis of the situation, to flat out greed in reaction to that snazzy automobile.
Why am I writing such an inconsquential story down? Well, because I'm still troubled. I had a chance to possibly get a potentially dangerous driver off of the road (What if he dozes off and hits a kid selling girlscout cookies next time?). However, the liklihood that I would have gotten anything besides hassle, and higher insurance rates was low. I think I made the right decision, for all I know he's a perfectly safe driver who just had a brief lapse.
But still, I'm a little troubled.
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