A metaphor for Tumblr shame culture
lies:
On the week of my 20th birthday, I took the car to work. It was a long and busy day, 7:30-22:00, and I was working on little sleep and too little food and too much stress. At 22:00, I finally left work and started driving home. I was tired and distracted and in all likelihood was driving below par. It happens, especially to younger drivers. We know that feeling.
At the entrance to my town, there’s a stop sign and a left turn. I reached it, stopped as usual, cast a look to my right, saw a car that seemed pretty far off, and turned left. But I guess that in the dark, in my tiredness and stress, I miscalculated how far away that car actually was relative to my turn. Apparently. You see, nothing happened. I kept driving, now with a car behind me.
And as I kept driving, I noticed that the car was… still behind me. By the time I turned onto my street, I was a bit surprised. When the car turned with me to my side of the street, I was downright suspicious (I lived on a cul-de-sac). I parked at the street’s end (where my house was), and stayed for a moment in the car, listening to a song and organizing my bag. The large black SUV that had seemingly followed me from the entrance of town remained stopped across the street.
I got out of the car and a large, 50-ish year old man (who must have been almost twice my weight if not much taller than me) got out of the SUV. “What the hell kind of driver do you think you are?” he shouted at me, approaching me as I started walking towards my house. I stood shocked and frightened, baffled at what was happening. “Excuse me?” I asked. “Do you not stop at stop signs?” he spat mockingly. I tried to explain to him that I had stopped, that maybe I had miscalculated the distances, but he kept shouting at me, “I had to brake to keep from smashing into you!” [This, I should note, would be his own fault since our town is very small and the speed limit is very low.] “You’re a terrible driver! You need to be off the road!”
I ran into my house, crying and shaking and frightened by the significantly-older-than-me and larger-than-me stranger who had followed me home, waited for me as I left my car, and shouted at me violently in the street.
You see, I have little doubt that the man was somewhere in the right. I probably didn’t look properly. I probably was driving distractedly and didn’t wait for his car to pass before turning left. In all likelihood, he had every right to be angry or frustrated or scared of causing an almost-accident.
But he took that accurate premise and dove off a cliff with it.
If someone messes up on the road, you should point out that they’re driving dangerously! You flash your lights, your turn on hazards sometimes, maybe you even honk to indicate an immediate danger. You do not follow the young driver home and accost them the moment they step out of their car. The man’s purpose – allegedly to educate and enlighten me – backfired in two ways:
1. I got into an accident two days later, directly caused by a new lack of confidence while driving and severe anxiety behind the wheel. This anxiety has since increased tenfold. (The accident itself was very minor, but it has made me a worse driver.)
2. Ever since that incident, I can’t drive into my town without checking my rearview mirror nonstop to see if someone is following me. If a car continues with me all the way to my street, I begin to shake. I am paranoid at that stop sign and will check it two or three or four times before turning (especially at night), which is decidedly excessive and even dangerous.
The man tried to “educate” me by shaming me about my driving. But what did he really achieve? A deeply ingrained lack of confidence in driving and absolute terror whenever a car stays on my tail for longer than thirty seconds. He has in fact made me a worse and less-safe driver.
This is shame culture. It’s the approach that equates shouting with education, that dismisses youth for natural mistakes and writes them off entirely, that rather than helping people learn and grow frightens them away and scars them. It’s an approach which says you are all or nothing, and that you should be hounded for any and all mistakes you might make.
I would never want to imply that somehow all of Tumblr social justice works like this (Tumblr, after all, is not a homogenous entity, rather it is comprised of multitudes of bloggers with vastly different approaches and beliefs), but the experiences I’ve seen with shame culture at large and through a prominent slice of Tumblr’s social justice side lead me to feel like I’m back in that car again. Tumblr culture often deals with extremes: pedestals and trashcans. People are written off quickly and sharply, and angry shaming is mistaken for criticism. And people cannot climb back out from the depths, they are gone forever. People cannot grow or learn from their mistakes. Especially since many of those who are silenced and demonized are themselves young and impressionable, still learning and growing.
Don’t be the scary man whose original, legitimate point was destroyed when decided to follow a teenage girl home to shout at her for a minor indiscretion. Don’t shame people. Educate them by literally any other means.
Flash your lights at them.
It’s unfortunate that this man’s stalky/aggressive misbehavior (which I acknowledge that this was) made you feel bad. As an older dude who’s tried to train his teenage offspring to be better drivers, though, I also identified a little. That makes me wonder some things.
I wonder what his own experience with accidents might be. Was he or a loved one ever injured or killed in one? Was he himself the cause of such an injury or death? Vehicle accidents are, I believe, the most common cause of severe injury and death for young adults, so it wouldn’t be surprising. I could see an experience like that contributing to someone acting the way he did.
You assert that flashing one’s lights is an appropriate and sufficient response. It seems unlikely to me, though, that it would rise to the level of actually changing the behavior of someone unfamiliar enough with the potential consequences of inattentive driving that they would try to defend/justify it (as you appeared to do, in the remarks that introduced the story).
You assert that your accident a few days later was the result of the stress introduced by the experience of the guy following/yelling at you. A competing hypothesis would be that you were involved in the later accident because you are, by your own admission, an inexperienced driver prone to inattentiveness. How did you separate the contribution of the two factors?
I believe one of the principle differences between younger and older drivers is that younger drivers tend to be significantly /overconfident/, leading to their displaying exactly the sort of casual/routine attitude toward inattentiveness that you appeared to in your intro.
Peace of mind is a good thing, of course, but in certain contexts anxiety can be rational and beneficial. Over the long term, it’s likely that you’ll have other anxiety-provoking experiences behind the wheel, and that you will adjust your driving habits to try to minimize them. So maybe this experience will turn out to have that as a silver lining?
I would never want anyone to be terrified by strange men following and yelling at them, and I agree that shaming people is generally a dick move. But so is operating a several-thousand-pound projectile around other people without being suitably mindful of the potential consequences.
We should all strive to minimize dickliness.
Lies, you think too well of the world if you don’t see how some people are just assholes, and will take the opportunity to vent their road rage on other drivers. I’m not going to make up some backstory on this dude and try to justify his actions, what he did was creepy and wrong and honestly someone should have called the police on him. And if you don’t think that having someone follow you home and shout at you will affect how you operate a vehicle in the future.. well.. consider yourself fortunate then??? Not everyone is as fortunate as you. We all react to stress and traumatic events differently.
For what it’s worth, I agree completely with every statement you ( @silvermittt ) made here.
Reposted from http://ift.tt/1NTC62W.
