Legal Commentary

I've been out of commission for the past week, blogging-wise. My wife and I had to travel unexpectedly to Kansas for five days to care for my mother-in-law, who took a bad fall and suffered a compression fracture of a vertebrae. That's serious business for a 90 year-old woman. After lots of morphine and a surgical procedure, she was discharged from the hospital, but she needs to use a walker and a wheel chair to get around. Numerous issues had to be dealt with by my wife and two of her brothers who live there. My wife's expertise (in addition to the art of living and loving) is in medical insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, and related issues, and that expertise came in handy. Well, that expertise and the fact that she's a little ball of energy with the strength of a blue-white sun who loves to organize and "get it done."

Me, I tried to stay out of the way, buy the groceries, wine, and beer, and grab the Starbucks.

Outside of an unexpected four-hour trip to a local emergency room by my wife, her father and me, the trip went as well as could be expected. My wife's father has a variety of physical and mental impairments, some severe and others not unusual for a man his age. Because of the swarm of trial lawyers that infests our society and that plagues its medical profession, his doctor is forced to play a strong defense and rush him to the nearest hospital when a judgment call could be made the other way. To some degree, my father-in-law is lucky because he suffers from severe short-term memory loss and won't likely remember the ordeal. On the other hand, because he can't remember what you've just told him, you can have the exact same conversation with him every 15 seconds. That's four times a minute, 240 repetitions of the same two-line conversation per hour. Your personal version of "Ground Hog Day," only, you know, there isn't any Bill Murray around to make you laugh or Andie MacDowell to otherwise distract you from the urge to grab a bed pan and administer a little home-made anesthetic to the poor guy.

And speaking about being a lousy Christian:

On the 7-1/2 hour drive up I-35 from North Texas to Central Kansas, during which the temperature dropped from 57 to 16, I again experienced more proof of the utter fallacy of the bromide my dear mother used to exclaim, namely, that truck drivers are the safest drivers on the road. She must have meant the Road to Perdition.

We were just south of Norman, Oklahoma, and my wife was driving. We'd been stuck behind a convoy of seven or eight tractor-trailers driving in the left lane at a slow rate of speed, but about 1/2 mile-an-hour faster than the steady stream of slow pokes in the right-hand lane. We were the second car in the left lane behind the last truck. We were stymied for mile after mile. There was no way around them.

Finally, the driver of the car in front of us, a young woman, waved a hand in exasperation, and moved over to the right lane and slowed down. She either was giving up the ghost, or she wanted a break and planned to get off at the next exit and stoke up on some hot java and maybe a sweet roll and a syringe of crank. A few miles later, I noticed that there was finally an extended space in the right lane and asked my wife if she wanted to try to get around one or two of these bad boys. She took her shot, and made it around only the last truck in line before she pulled back into the left lane well in front of him. There was no question that she had plenty of room, and was not even close to cutting him off.

For reasons known only to him, the driver of the semi that she'd passed went off the deep end. He roared up on our back bumper. He gunned the engine. He kept dropping back them running up to almost hit us. When I turned around in my seat and looked back to see what the heck his problem might be, my wife warned me "not to start anything."

"Start what?" I asked. "I'm not armed and his truck outweighs your SUV by a ton or two."

"I know you," she replied. "You'll start something. Just ignore him."

"Until he runs us off the road and kills us, you mean? Can I get pissed off if he kills us? How about then? That ok with you if I get pissed off then?"

Well, at that point, the trucker turned on his lights, then the high beams, laid on the horn, long and loudly, abruptly changed lanes, and poured on the gas. He was suddenly right beside us. I turned to look at him and ignoring my wife's now slightly terrified shouts of "Kevin! Don't!" I put on my "Is that the toughest look you got?" face and looked up at this bozo, whose mug was twisted in rage and who was shouting something that any sane person would have understood couldn't have been heard above the horn blasts, much less through two rolled up windows and a 70 mph wind. I simply pointed at my temple repeatedly in the international sign of the loon, then made a little finger gun, pointed it at him, and shot it.

During this Marcel Marceau-like performance of a wise-ass speaking smack to derangement, the trucks in front of us, perhaps alerted by all the horn blasting, light flicking, and lane changing, pulled over to the right lane. My wife stomped on the gas pedal, and I quickly saw a vision of a spittle-spewing pie hole manning the cab of the semi fading quickly from view as we blew past the entire convoy.

"You ALWAYS get angry," my wife observed, wearily, not with rancor but with a resignation forged by three decades of intimacy. We'd been down this road many, many times.

"I tend to do that when people try to kill us," I replied dryly.

"You don't know he was trying to kill us."

"No, I don't KNOW what he actually, within the rabbit warren that is his squirrel-sized cerebrum, intended or didn't intend to do. I do know that he ACTED as if he wanted to run into us and given the weight disparity between our vehicles, that would likely--at these speeds--have resulted in us being killed. I also know that he ACTED as if he was enraged or deranged or both, and, therefore, in a state of mind that would support my belief that he intended to do us harm. I have to assume that if he walks like duck and quacks like a duck, maybe he's a duck."

"So," she asked, "what good did it do to make hand gestures and point at him? All that would do is push a crazy murderer over the edge to kill us, wouldn't it? You let other people who are angry make you angry, and then you just get violent like they get violent. Just ignore them. Don't let them bring you down to their hateful level."

"That's what Bill Clinton said about Osama bin Laden," I observed, reasonably. "If you make it to heaven before me, ask the folks in the Twin Towers on 9/11 if they'd have preferred that when Osama declared war on us, Bill had taken him seriously and just capped his sorry ass post haste instead of keeping him around so he could pay for flying lessons for a cadre of martyrs-on-the-make."

"So," she continued in her logical fashion that makes me love her more and more with each passing year,"if you'd had a gun a few moments ago, you would have shot that crazy truck driver. Is that what you're saying?"

"I don't know whether I would have succeeded in shooting him, but I'd have put six or seven shots from my Glock in as tightly spaced a pattern as I could manage given the wind shear and relative speeds of the vehicles, in a cluster focused on his gaping pie hole. If I jerked a little high, I'd take off the top of his head, and if I was low, I'd blow out his thorax. Either way, I'd give him the respect that I'd give any stranger who acts like he wants to kill me. I'd treat him like a man of his word. Or a man of his acts, in this case."

Then she dropped the big one.

"Ya' know, your return to 'The Church' is really transforming your entire outlook, isn't it? I can tell."

I thought about that for a couple of seconds.

"Well," I observed, "Jesus has to drive this car with the tires it came into the shop with, and mine are pretty short of tread depth, so you have to expect that the car's gonna' skid when the pavement's wet."

We both chuckled and shook our heads. Another slice of life in the fast lane.

She's right about me. I've always thought that any man who threatens another man's life ought to be subject to summary execution, and the utterance of a threat ought to be grounds for the immediate use of lethal force by the object of the threat. Why should a man have to live looking  over his shoulder? That view is neither legally nor spiritually sound, but that's my nature. Shoot first and sleep soundly at night is a motto that I could live with in my prior life. If you get caught, hire Johnny Cochran and insist upon a trial by a jury of your peers.

I realize that while a truly devout Christian might wake up in the morning singing "Jesus, Take The Wheel," I still occasionally wake up singing "Woke Up This Morning, Got Myself A Gun." That realization doesn't make me discouraged about the power of prayer. Rather, it convinces of the absolute need for it. At least, the absolute need for it in my personal case, which, I suspect, is not unique.

As for you, Mr. Crazed Truck Driver, I have no idea what got your rage on, pal. You snorting too much speed? Did my wife ruin your drafting in the slip-stream of the truck in front of you? Were you truckers all playing some kind of road warrior leap frog and my wife crashed the line? Whatever it was, I strongly urge you get some counseling. The next guy you threaten might actually pull a piece from the glove compartment or from under the seat and give you more than a finger.

I'll add you to the prayer list. Me first, though. I need it more than you do.