If the South rises again...we better learn to use our horns!

After 18 years living in the capitol of the Confederacy, I understand most things. I understand Richmonders enduring reverence for their Civil War heroes and their need to see effigies of these heroes every day. I understand using last names as first names, and first names that are hyphenated and as long as my entire name. I even understand how to pronounce Powhite.

But I’ll never understand – even if I live here until my dying day – why Richmonders refuse to honk their horns. I’ve seen people patiently sit through a whole light cycle because the first person in line was rifling through her purse. I’ve seen car after car turn left well after their light has turned red, and the person going straight wait patiently for someone to obey a traffic law. I’ve even seen people walk out in front of oncoming cars and drivers politely screech to a halt to allow those audacious pedestrians safe passage.

I understand southern gentility. Really I do. But even politeness has its time and place. There’s no one who can convince me that letting someone sit unaware at a green light is the polite thing to do. If I’m that “asleep at the wheel” chump, I consider it a great favor for someone to honk me back to consciousness and allow you , and me, to get through the light before it turns red again. Honest!

Even when you use your horn for its real intent – safety – in this city, you are considered a cheeky character. Recently, I was waiting to turn out of my neighborhood and the person ahead of me continued to let off the brake, each time rolling a little closer toward my car. I finally (in warning only) ever-so-gingerly tapped my horn. She threw her hands in the air in the old “what do you want me to do?” gesture. I guess if I had any manners at all I would’ve just let her hit me!

If you can’t honk your horn to encourage action or thwart accident in this city of civility, it’s certainly not acceptable to use your horn to greet someone or even to draw a driver’s attention to something amiss. Richmonders will assume you’re crazy, flirting with them or about to commit a drive-by shooting, and they’ll do whatever it takes to escape that mortifying honking.

Sometimes I think that Richmonders equate tapping the horn with improprieties like speaking too loudly in a restaurant, arguing in public, or voicing any sort of dissatisfaction within earshot of others. It means calling attention to ourselves and Southerners are not at all comfortable with making a spectacle of any sort.

So why, I’m left to wonder, do cars in Richmond even come equipped with these devices of disrespect and deviance? Isn’t it like selling a vegetarian a set of cutlery with steak knives or a confirmed bachelor a cable package with Lifetime? Not only is it a waste of good money but couldn’t it also result in a random act of aberrant behavior?

I’m convinced that one day some errant Richmond driver is going to feel particularly saucy and let slip an insolent blast of their horn. And before we know it, this once-serene little burg will be a cacophony of toots, beeps and blasts. It may be just the ticket to relieve hundreds of years of Southern repression…or at the very least, I might get through a light on the first cycle now and again.