It's an external prosthetic for self-esteem.
The bigger the front grille, the more pressing the urge to show the world who the alpha male is around here.
And that is precisely the kind of guy a young woman and her eight-year-old daughter ran into on the D6 highway near Jesenice.
She was driving through a road construction zone.
Fifty.
Thirty.
Fifty again.
And she was doing that terrible thing that can drive certain drivers virtually out of their minds.
She was observing the speed limit.
Behind her was a black SUV.
Riding her bumper.
Flashing its lights.
Honking its horn.
Then it overtook her, began brake-checking her, and finally came to a dead stop in front of her car.
You might think that gives us this year’s undisputed regional champion of road loutishness.
Not quite.
The worst was yet to come.
The driver got out.
Walked over to her car.
Yanked open her door.
And, according to the police, proceeded to brutally beat the woman around the head and body.
In front of her eight-year-old daughter.
This is where my sense of humor runs dry.
Because a road idiot flashing high beams, honking, and tailgating is, unfortunately, common folklore.
But a man who stops his vehicle, opens a woman's car door, and beats her in front of her child is no longer just an "irritable driver."
That is assault.
And at that point, the vehicle is merely the weapon and the means the perpetrator used to engineer an opportunity.
And do you know who showed true presence of mind throughout the whole ordeal?
The eight-year-old girl.
When the man realized everything had been recorded by a dashcam, he attempted to seize it, according to police reports.
The little girl hid it under her seat.
So let's recap.
A grown man in an SUV lost his head.
An eight-year-old child kept hers.
Not exactly a flattering score on the maturity test.
Then came the excuses.
According to media reports, the man claimed he felt she had brake-checked him earlier.
The trouble is, dashcams possess one very inconvenient trait.
They have no ego.
They don't have bad days.
They feel no urge to win an argument.
They just record.
And police say the footage fully corroborates the victim's account.
Which leaves us with this baffling equation:
A woman drives according to the posted limit.
A man gets enraged.
He brake-checks her.
He blocks traffic.
He assaults her.
And then he still tries to explain why it was somehow somebody else's fault.
That is no longer road traffic.
That is a behavioral disorder on wheels.
And this is where I'd like to voice something that might not be universally popular.
I think we are far too lenient with this sort of behavior.
We brush it off with terms like:
Aggressive driver.
Incident.
Dispute.
Scuffle.
Tempers flaring behind the wheel.
No.
A dispute is when two people bicker over a parking spot.
Tempers flaring is when you shout something at someone that shouldn't be said in front of children.
Deliberately brake-checking someone on a highway, forcing them to stop, and then marching over to physically attack them belongs in an entirely different category.
A car weighs a ton and a half.
Often two tons.
At highway speeds, it is an enormous mass of iron packed with kinetic energy that can kill multiple people in a matter of seconds.
A driver's license, therefore, is not an inalienable human right.
It is a privilege.
Society is saying to you:
Fine. We trust that you are sane and responsible enough to safely operate two tons of steel in close proximity to other human beings.
And if someone begins turning that steel into an instrument for settling personal scores, intimidation, and highway terror, we ought to ask ourselves a very simple question:
Why on earth should we ever hand it back to them down the line without a second thought?
I would like to see Czech law come down with absolute severity in cases like this.
Not out of vengeance.
For the protection of everyone else.
If someone is proven to have deliberately used a motor vehicle for dangerous brake-checking and then physically assaulted another person, we ought to have the power to say:
Dear sir, public transit is a marvelous thing.
We have trains.
We have buses.
We have timetables.
And if you behave, you might even get a window seat.
Because this isn't a parking ticket.
This isn't exceeding the speed limit by five kilometers per hour.
According to the police account, this man first endangered a car carrying a mother and her child, and then beat that mother right before the child's eyes.
And by the way—that little girl will likely carry that scene in her memory for a very long time.
That might be the most sickening part of all.
We adults read the article.
We get outraged.
We leave a comment.
We give it a thumbs-up.
In two days, a fresh headline takes over.
Yet an eight-year-old girl sat in that car and watched a strange man tear open the door and start pummeling her mother.
No dashcam will ever erase that.
And one more thing.
I grew up in an era when fathers would occasionally tell us rather old-fashioned things.
Some were nonsense.
Some I wouldn't repeat to my own kids today.
Yet one still strikes me as thoroughly sound:
A man never hits a woman.
Period.
We don't need a symposium to debate it.
We don't need a panel of experts.
We don't need to analyze engine displacement, traffic conditions, or momentary testosterone spikes.
A man who feels the urge to prove his strength by beating a woman in front of her eight-year-old child isn't demonstrating strength at all.
He is demonstrating its exact opposite.
And perhaps we ought to start paying closer attention to highway aggression across the board.
Flashing high beams.
Tailgating inches from a rear bumper.
Deliberate brake-checking.
Running others off the road.
High-speed chases on the interstate.
Because these are not harmless little male rituals.
At a hundred or a hundred and thirty kilometers per hour, a single display of fragile ego can easily end in a funeral for someone who had nothing whatsoever to do with the whole pathetic theater.
So here is my small wish for this morning.
Let's stop confusing aggression with strength.
A big car with authority.
And a driver's license with a lifetime entitlement.
Because a truly strong man has no need to lecture another woman on the highway.
And he certainly has no need to hit her.
You see, anyone can buy a big SUV.
Becoming a big man is something you have to earn.