My Bad

A couple of days ago, as I was crossing the street (on the way to the grocer's) with my wife and child, some idiot in a Toyota Fortuner chose to speed up as he approached the cross walk. We stopped just in time and the bastard flew past us; stirring up dust in his wake. My immediate, automatic reaction was a loud one:

"I hope you fucking crash and everyone in that fucking car of yours dies, you stinking piece of shit!"

Joy ignored it, but my unabashedly angry candor had left me thinking--was I evil? Had I been reduced to an angry mass of volatility? I thought for a moment and concluded, based on experience, that under the same circumstance, most other people would hurl a number of profanities at the driver and probably call him something you can't say in church; but to want people to actually die? I must be evil, or at the very least, a very bad person.

The thought process:

I merely wished that bastard ill will, I did nothing tangible to facilitate something bad actually happening to him. Mine was nothing but a wish, and we all know that the all-time hitting percentage of wishes isn't something to be proud of. How many people who wished they won the lottery actually have? So, in addition to doing nothing physical to express my anger at the son of a bitch, the method I instead chose to employ was not a particularly effective one.

Now, Mr. Idiot sped up as he neared the cross walk, thereby putting my family in actual danger. Speeding up was a voluntary act on SuperMoron's part, an act that undoubtedly put peoples' lives in danger exponentially more than any wish of ill will ever could. John Wilkes Booth's thoughts of killing Abraham Lincoln did not kill the president, what killed Lincoln were bullets from Booth's gun--bullets launched by Booth's voluntary act of pulling the trigger.

Is wanting someone to die as bad as doing something about it? Screw Ethics for a second, think in real-world terms. If you were an assassin, what would your weapon of choice be: a massive vocabulary or a loaded gun?