By Giosue’ Santarelli

There are parts in automobiles primarily used as safety devices. Modern vehicles have airbags, padded dashboards, and specially designed head rests. Simple devices such as seatbelts were auto after-thoughts long after baby-boomer childhoods. Many a middle-aged man or woman has the radio button pocked-forehead scars to prove it.

We’ve come a long way, or have we? The most misused safety feature on a car is the horn. Never mind that roadways are strewn with carnage like fans in the aftermath of a World Cup soccer match gone awry. Spend any time driving in rush-hour traffic, and you’d think you were at a Green Bay Packers football game during the Lombardi era. These abundant loud blasts emanating from cars carry a sentiment much worse than a Bronx cheer.

Originally designed to warn other motorists, beep-”Hey don’t drive in front of me that’s dangerous”-has more aptly become honk-”You stupid @%$!& moron, who the #@&”!$% taught you how to drive?”

Often the horn is accompanied by specific hand gestures, and uncontrolled contorted muscular gesticulations. Now, in a split-second after someone cuts you off on the highway, you shoot anger down your arm, through the horn, and right at the offender. It’s almost like turning on an electrical switch to a bolt of lightning. If you were in a James Bond 007 hot-rod you would have hit the rocket-firing button to vaporize the road perpetrator into a mere Ford Taurus dust cloud.

Today the horn has become somewhat more of a safety device not to warn other drivers, but to curse them once the offense has been committed. Thus it keeps the offended safe.

Driving down a roadway going the speed limit, and having someone pull their car out in front of you ten feet before you arrive, is frustrating, and bruising to your brake-pedal foot. Then, when they have the audacity to drive seven miles per hour in front of you afterward, it sends most drivers’ hands to the steering wheel to sound the alarm.

Eventually you pull behind them at a stoplight, and if you hadn’t blasted your horn you might get out and confront the #&%@%*% knucklehead.

So the horn performs a service for you without having to actually exercise your body by getting out of your car, pulling them from theirs, and beating the crap out of the inconsiderate S.O.B.

Of course, doing so is the result of the much dreaded and conveniently invented “road rage.” Let’s face it; some people deserve a good smacking to stimulate their driving skills.

Getting a driver’s attention, after all, is the main design of the much dreaded “speed trap” utilized by the authorities. Teenagers, soccer moms, little ol’ ladies, men over 80 years old, and folks who can’t see over the steering wheel should not have licenses. However, any one of these is confrontable once they’ve misguidedly slid in your lane like a black cat crossing your path. As such, something bad is going to happen. It can be a simple horn blast and raised finger, or it could be worse.

Your mother would think you crazy if you got out of your car to vent your displeasure with other drivers. She’d say something like, “What if that person was built like Mike Tyson or something? You don’t know what they’ve got in their car!”

Aside from potentially having your ear bitten off, telling the other driver what you think of their performance is an American tradition. It has only come into vogue in the last decade or so that folks have decided to deliver the message in person. The horn protects us from such hazardous work. After all, those other guys always drive like @^&%$#* imbeciles, and you are the model of highway perfection.

If things don’t escalate after you are perturbed enough to jump from your car and visit their front door at the stoplight, you still might find yourself being shipped off to anger-management classes if the scene is witnessed by the “police officer donut patrol.”

So ya see, it might be better just to stay in your car and channel your distress via the horn.

However, if you have a compact car with the volume of an annoying yapping Chihuahua, you might want to install a super-decibel-delivering Mack Truck-size diesel horn capable of delivering a rear-window-shattering blast. That would teach those #$@^%s to stay out of your way, or at least make you memorable.

Heck, if nothing else, at least you’d have a great road-rage story to tell in anger-management class!

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Giosue’ Santarelli is a prolific political columnist, humor columnist, and feature writer who has been scribbling for nearly 40 years. Visit his humor column website “The Devil’s Advocate” at .

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