Drifting across the Internet this evening, I happened across a rather peculiar story in the LA Times opinion section.  The story is as entertaining as a Sunday drive gone bizarrely wrong; which, when you get right down to it, is pretty close to what the story is all about.

The story, you see, is about the author who was out driving one day when some guy in a mini-van pulled up along side him and told him that he should be listening to talk radio, rather than the old music he was playing instead.  To most of us, of course, this would come as more than a bit of a surprise.  We don’t normally plan to be interrupted from our cocoons of roadway silence except in case of some sort of emergency, and it would be hard to fault the author for finding the whole encounter rather rude.  And so, like any of us in his place might do, the author decides that the best response is to roll up his window and waste an untold amount of his day following and stalking the van.

The author, it seems, had just entered into to the Left’s curious love affair with hate.

To even think about chasing the van out of town should be far enough over the edge for any man to consider, but as he followed the man in the van, his mind seemed to wind down more bizarre back alleys than his car is ever likely to find.  He “tailed the driver of the Caravan as indiscreetly as possible, hoping he’d see me, realize who I was, get nervous, then scared, then terrified, then have a massive coronary and slam into a 300-year-old sycamore.”  A prayer that another man receive the death penalty, simply for suggesting a different station on the radio.  And a murderous prayer that he would be that conservative’s angel of death.

Luckily, in the end, he backs off from his murderous rage, and sets about writing this interesting anecdote for the paper.  No harm, no foul, I suppose.

But what, I wonder, might be the “symptoms of a sick society” which could cause a man who is ideally so tolerant of the opinions of others to chase out of town those opinions which differ from his own.  It certainly isn’t Internet-promoted “democratization [that] leads people to believe that their opinions not only count but must be broadcast at every opportunity.”  Or, who knows, perhaps it is.  A man with a bumper sticker and who actually gets paid when his ideas are broadcast is certainly going to be farther ahead than a man with an old van with power windows.  But no.  The freedom of speech and an open dialogue of political discourse are the light and cleanser which wipe away rage.  The answer, surely, must be something else.

Perhaps, in the end, the author gives us just the hint that we need to find out what the true source of “uranium-enriched behavior” in political society is.  It may simply be the impulse response to chase away disfavored ideas while casting those who express those ideas in a hostile light.  Perhaps it is not “democratization” that is the problem, but the attempt to shut down, thwart, bypass, suppress, chase away, and ram democracy into a 300-year-old sycamore that is really at fault.

Perhaps what we really need to do is put everyone on the Left through classes in anger management.