Just woke up and remembered a lad trying to start a fight with me as I got in a taxi last night. He was wasted and giving grief to some guy for being black so I told him calmly and politely to leave it out. The taxi driver told me I should have punched him.
I told the taxi driver that if I'd done that he would have woken up the next morning with a bruised face more angry than ever, and some other person would have been on the receiving end of his anger and frustration somewhere down the line, that it wouldn't have done anyone any good in the long run.
The taxi driver told me that he wouldn't have thought about it like that, that he would have punched first and asked questions later.
This is the problem with the world. People don't think enough. We often allow what we call our emotions to dictate our behaviour, usually at critical moments when logic and restraint are most called for, and we then justify it with 'I was angry'. This is no excuse. Anger and other emotions are much like alcohol. They cause us to behave in strange ways that we would not normally behave. They take control of us and jump in front of the rational thought processes that normally dictate our behaviour.
It is not easy to get in front of our emotions when they rear up. We spend our lives trying to keep ahead of them, and if we didn't or couldn't we would live like animals.
Our emotions are what we call instinct. The chemically induced contexts that take pole position in historically important situations of survival. They do not always act in our favour though. Despite the rigours of natural selection, the nature of the world is that mankind has evolved complicated social structures that relieve us of the literal struggle for survival. These social structures have arisen as a a result of conscious, logical thought, not instinct. Instinct is always there, in the back seat, but the driver is logical thought: Contemplation: Consideration: Imagination.
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