Yes. I am not responsible for this rant, for I am currently the victim of "idiot rage." Therefore, I have absolutely no guilt for the ideas and phrases herein. So grin and bear it.
Looking around the Internet and newspapers, it seems, more and more, that people's behavior is explained away by some kind of "rage." Fools who beat each other on the roads are under "road rage" while idiots on planes have "air rage." Bollocks and nonsense. The list goes on, incidentally, to include "sports rage" and probably other ones that I am not aware of yet.
The basic premise is that the human psyche is so fragile that slight problems and delays in the area mentioned can cause someone to snap. Also bollocks. Some people cannot tolerate delay (due to the speeding-up of America) so when the plane is 4 minutes late leaving the terminal, they do something very unkind to the flight attendant. This is not "rage", this is somebody who is foolishly irrational and does not have a sense of perspective. "Rage" is a very colorful word, normally meaning something like the complete loss of control in a life-threatening or desperate situation; it should not be tossed around like this, where some idiot cannot stand that his kid has been benched for standing around like a statue in the game. To all involved: This is not the end of the world. There will be other games. Get over it. This string of simple sentences applies to basically all of the "rages"; five minutes of delay on the freeway is not worth beating someone senseless with a tire iron, nor is anything else this basic. It is pop psychology to say someone is suffering from "rage" of some kind, (prepare for political argument) and this is primarily a Democratic argument. "It is not Jimmy's fault," they say, "He beat that cashier unconcious because he was undergoing the affliction of Convenience Store Rage." Nothing is anybody's fault anymore; I do not like fault and usually try to pass it off because it results in very unpleasant consequences, but at least I admit that there is fault somewhere involved, unlike Democrats who say fault does not exist and is just our misinterpretation of someone's unfortunate condition. This is further nonsense. People who get in lots of fights do not have a "rage" problem, they have a short temper and very little self-control, or they are sadists/masochists. Republicans at least have the virtue of knowing "This is not right, and it is your fault," while Pat Buchanan's party would say, "It's the damn (fill in minority group/race/religion/whatever)' fault." At any rate, it is one of the reasons I registered unaffiliated; Democrats seem to have a huge problem when it comes to the current form of reality: there are no such things as "fault" and "responsibility" when it comes to these things any more. Everything is excusable. A frightening concept, considering that those same Democrats, if I went on a shooting spree in their ranks, would say that I was suffering from some kind of debilitating mental disease and should be locked up forever in a psych ward filled with orderlies who would talk to me as if I were permanently three years old. Some of the mental patients have a lot more intelligence than the doctors and orderlies who treat them, in my opinion.
At any rate, I further claim this right: I claim the right to declare that fault exists!
Epilogue: Darn, I guess that means I cannot use the "idiot rage" defense for this....I willingly take whatever blame and responsibility are assigned for this.