Destructive Isolation

No, this isn't going to be about mental health or my views on how people need to man up and stop trying to blame everything but themselves in an effort to pretend to be a responsible person. Instead, this is going to be yet another diatribe against Seattle drivers.

Every time I drive anywhere, I always notice drivers with headphones in their ears. I've never understood this, especially in today's days where most cars have an auxiliary input or even bluetooth audio streaming. (I mean, if you can afford a car, you can afford a cable for your car.) Having headphones makes you audibly isolated from your surroundings, which puts you and other drivers around you in dangerous situations as you lose a sense by which you can react to a situation. Granted I haven't seen this result in disaster yet, but I've seen drivers not even notice when honked at when they weren't paying attention to the light change to green,  and another driver who didn't even notice there was a fire truck with sirens blaring right behind him. This isn't something I noticed until I got to Seattle, but of course this isn't a surprise because Seattle drivers treat traffic rules and common sense just like they treat anything else: by being a hipster and thinking they're better than it all.

This also gets towards a general theme of avoiding driver responsibility (so kind of back to the first point I said I wasn't going to go on about). With all the technological tools available to drivers today, drivers seem to have come to rely on them instead of actually being responsible drivers. We've probably all heard of someone who was on a motorcycle that was hit (or almost got hit) by a car changing lanes because the bind spot indicator didn't say that the blind spot was occupied. Naturally these things can be avoided if drivers would actually use their mirrors and check their blind spots. The same goes for the front-collision avoidance system, as drivers should be paying attention on the road and should thus be able to avoid this kind of idiocy. Too many of these commercials shows these drivers being distracted and being "saved" by these systems. Hint: if you need to rely on technology to prevent you from being a completely worthlessly terrible driver, you shouldn't be driving. The car I drive has none of these features (nor does it have a back-up cam or anything of that sort either) and I get along just fine.