This is my love-letter to the people who are in too much of a hurry to treat me like a person.  I was about to call you drivers but that word takes the human out of you.  You are more than a pair of headlights next to my bumper.  You are not a car, or a driver, but a person who cares about things — your boredom, your feeling of power over others, the tedium of your life — but not about me.

You cannot wait to get past me, I know that.  I know that my doing seven miles over the speed limit isn’t enough for you — otherwise, you wouldn’t be showing me the filaments in your headlights.  So you pass me, and then you move to the right lane to get around the next person, and then you zoom ahead until you are on the tail of yet another person, and when she moves aside, you speed past, then cut in front of her and exit the interstate.

You are not a driver — you are a person, responsible for your actions.  Whatever your agenda is, I didn’t sign up for it, and neither of us want me to be part of it.

Since I am good at math, let me do some of it for you.  I assume you have a 30-minute commute — 8 minutes on surface streets, 22 on the local interstate.  The average speed on the interstate is 66 mph (vs a speed limit of 60) but you feel entitled to do 72 mph.  If you maintain or beat that speed, you will shave two minutes from your 30-minute commute.

Two minutes.  The length of two signal cycles.  Two red lights.

I would like to put you, the person behind me whose nosehairs I could trim using my rearview mirror, on notice: saving two red-lights worth of your time does not justify the risk of a collision, for you or for me.  So, as you race by, I ask you to think of our fleeting freeway encounter in terms of something closer to your heart: auto insurance premiums usually go up 40% after a claim is made.  Sweetheart.