We Are How We Drive

OP-ED

Official statistics have it that around 600 people die every year in Georgia and more than 10,000 are injured as a consequence of road accidents. The way Georgians drive their cars has no connection to our concept of Western civilization. We want to travel to Europe visa free, and blindly believe that we deserve that much freedom of movement, yet most of our drivers are so wild and barbaric that they deserve to drive nothing more than a cart with a pair of yoked bulls; certainly not a modern car. We are like savages at the wheel, with the exclusion of a few scared novices who have just gotten out of one of those outrageous driving schools in town. The entire driving system in Georgia is a typical paradigm of chaos, within which neurotic wheel-holders speed along, blind to the potentially life-threatening mannerisms of their driving.

I can hardly find an epithet that could describe the driving pattern in Georgia, except one: Aggressive! Yes, we are a nation of aggressive drivers, both male and female, who hurry even when they are not late; who are nervous when they have no reason to be; who breach the rules without reason; who overtake when not allowed to; who use the horn unnecessarily; who flash your rear view mirror with high beam to get you out of the way when there is really nowhere for you to go; who force you into an almost guaranteed accident while there is no exigency to change lane; who simply hate you…just because you are ahead of them on the road.

The human irritation and aggression on the streets of Georgia has no limits, and there is no law or regulation which could check the hell. Judging by the traffic picture, this country is a real cuckoo’s nest within which inmates have no recognition of each other as human beings, nor that there are rules that need to be observed.

As anywhere else in the world, traffic in Georgia has three main dimensions – driver, car and road – and of those three, drivers are mad, cars are bad and roads need mending. Aggressive driving is a custom here. Moreover, we are a nation of irrelevantly proud individuals who believe we have to be aggressive, especially when at the wheel, in order to feel ourselves internally content and at one with the world. And the worst part of this is that we have no chance to change because aggressiveness is our second nature. We usually turn a blind eye to this malicious feature of our character and take it all in our stride, but we must not, because our unbridled aggressiveness and proclivity for undue speed on the road is directly connected with the loss of thousands of human lives – unexpected, unnecessary and unjustified!!!

What can be done? It starts in the childhood of those whose character is molded in families and among peers in schools and on the streets, where aggressiveness is a norm, meaning the tendency to drive aggressively seeps into our veins in our very adolescence, if not before. So, nothing will change unless society, all society, changes at the roots and takes on the correct upbringing of future generations based on better values of civilization – both Western and Eastern.

It goes without saying that an adult who learns to drive with a-priori accumulated aggressiveness in character will never be able to act as a calm, balanced, tolerant and defensive driver because aggressiveness was instilled in the character of that person over years, something needing more than a night to extract. I have no reason at this moment to squeeze even an iota of optimism out of my speaking apparatus to say that we will improve any time soon. It will perhaps take scores of years to change our modus operandi at the wheel.

For the time being, we will have to handle the situation with the most stringent laws and their strictest possible enforcement if we want to save lives for this dwindling nation.

Nugzar B. Ruhadze