What if we got along?

 I have the habit of viewing human beings through the lens of evolutionary theory. My friend Jake, who, unlike myself, has genuine education in and understanding of evolution has complained that people without true knowledge of the subject, again, like myself, will make misguided statements about evolution, so take anything related to that I say with a Lot's Wife sized pillar of salt. But in my defense, Jake has never refuted any hypothesis I've proffered, but maybe he's just evolved (sic) a high degree of tolerance.

If you watch or listen or read news reports, you may have the sense that human beings are prone to conflict, and I wouldn't disagree with you. Often, I think it shouldn't be so difficult for people to realize that cooperation would better aggression most often, but then my old friend, a possibly incorrect sense of evolution, presents the following hypothesis. Even in the times before farming, which on an evolutionary time scale is not long ago, food was necessary for survival, and enough food to nourish a human's calorie hungry brain required enough space to grow, be that on hooves, paws, roots, or scales, so without enough space per person, people starved.

Starving will kill, and dead people tend to not reproduce. They pass on passing on their genes. Nature can be a pretty selective club, especially when times aren't bountiful, so when resources were scarce, the aggressive trait of taking the space needed had a survival advantage. On the flip side, if two or more people could work together to take what they needed, they had an advantage over various freelance individuals trying to survive alone, so the ability to get along with a known group had a survival benefit as well. Cooperative aggression survived.

When riding a bike, a person is "other" to the person, with all their evolutionary baggage, sealed inside the steel, metal, glass, and plastic of an automobile. If that "other" is taking space on the road, that old evolutionary suitcase perceives this as a threat, and can aggressively attack, somewhat like the person in a car yesterday who shouted something at me (Evolution has yet to give humans an inherent awareness of the Doppler effect, so anything said was largely unintelligible, but I suspect it was negative and related to myself, my bike, and my poled flagging taking space on the side of Route 202) and then completed their unobstructed pass to pull into and block the designated bicycle lane, possibly to bequeath me a talking-to.

Massachusetts statute clearly states that parking or even stopping a motor vehicle in a bicycle lane is illegal. That makes sense, or they'd be called parking spots. Fortunately, traffic wasn't too heavy (always fortunate), so I pulled into the other travel lane to pass, palm thumping the car's sheet metal a couple times as a defensive strategy to inform the driver of my presence.

Yes, those palm thumps were an even further violation of the survival id's space and the car passed me again to once again block the still designed bicycle lane. I repeated my pass, as I was on the road to travel, not inflict my misunderstanding of road rules on other users, although by this time, I guessed they were fully aware of me and refrained from further thumps of notice. We continued up the road, with them ironically truly obstructing other users with the width of their vehicle, but I suppose a grasp of irony might be too much to expect of a vehicle operator with limited understanding of road laws.

With time and interactions on the road, now my first response with any motorist who persists is to photograph their license plate, and in this case, violation of the bicycle lane.

A mile or two later, back into my town of Granby, I heard the blip of a police siren behind me and pulled off into a curb cut. Convenient, I'd been planning to ride into the police station if the car continued following me to that point.  Officer Jorgensen (name used with permission) started with me, saying the driver called to complain I'd kicked their car in passing. Yes, sealed in a box, even with mirrors, people have a limited perception of the world, so I corrected this error explaining, no, the car was stopped, illegally, in the bicycle lane, and without a horn to give notice, I'd palmed it while passing as a safety warning.

Officer Jorgensen asked me to wait while he spoke to the driver, so I glanced to the sun, and agreed it was high enough to still make it home in daylight even with some delay. The officer was quick returning to send me on my way (thank you) saying he'd be giving the driver a lecture on bicycle lanes, although he, as I'd been aware, could not cite for the stopping violation that occurred outside of town. I wished him good safety, a wish he likewise returned, and continued home, happy with the police force my tax dollars from a couple days prior support!