In considering this image, which I fashioned myself using one of those online highway sign makers, I am reminded of John Stewart’s summary image of how a sane society ought to behave. It is an image that predictably came from a person raised in New Jersey, with aspirations of going somewhere.

A sane society, as Stewart framed it in his closing statement at his Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, is akin to a bunch of cars merging in a traffic jam around some highway intersection. Civilized virtue, in this view, amounted to having enough patience and fellow feeling to sometimes allow someone else ahead of you. Civility is both the child and savior of common frustration.

It’s a nice image, instantly comprehensible to the majority of people, but it’s always seemed to me unsatisfying in a number of ways.

In the first place, if life is a traffic jam around an onramp or interchange, we might just want to end it now. Sure, we can be polite to each other for a while, but how long before the pointless tedium of it all catches up?

Secondly, not everyone is trapped in traffic. And sometimes those fuckers are deciding that it’s time for traffic problems in Fort Lee.