I was raised to be a fair, even-handed person who is willing to accept everyone at face value and not to stereotype people. I’ve been a long proponent of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), putting me at odds with the current administration in Washington, DC, which has done everything in its power to eliminate anything remotely resembling equity and inclusion.
That said, I have to confess to an irrational prejudice that those who know me find inexplicable. I intensely dislike people who drive pickup trucks. Whenever I’m driving, and a pickup truck comes into view, I tense up, and when I’m walking, and I see one coming, even on the other side of the road, I keep an eye on it until it’s out of sight. I have a similar reaction to black Chevy Suburbans with tinted windows, just not as intense.
Now, you might be wondering: how can someone who claims to be all-in for diversity and fairness react this way to something as innocuous as the type of vehicle someone is driving? It’s really simple.
Even though I know my rancor is irrational, it is deeply rooted in my psyche and comes from life experience. This creates the kind of embedded phobia or anger that even expensive therapy would find difficult to eliminate.
My dislike of pickup trucks and their drivers stems from my childhood experiences. I grew up in a small East Texas town that had a population of just over seven hundred, mostly farmers or lumber mill workers. Just about everyone owned a pickup, a handy vehicle for hauling cargo, small livestock, or people.
Most of the truck owners I knew were basically decent people, but there was another category of pickup truck drivers that were in a class all their own. Low-class rednecks whose idea of amusement was throwing empty Coke bottles at kids walking home from school or doing errands for their families.
On more than one occasion, when I was delivering groceries from town a mile away from my grandmother’s house, I was forced to duck coke bottles aimed my way, and to endure the raucous laughter of a truck full of hicks laughing as I scrambled to pick up the groceries scattered all over the shoulder of the road and in the ditch.
This was in the 1950s, a time of rigid segregation when someone like me didn’t have the option of reporting such incidents to the local law, especially when it was quite likely that the town constable’s son was one of the bottle throwers.
To this day, over sixty years later, I still tense up whenever I’m walking on the sidewalk and I see a pickup approaching, or if I’m driving and a pickup appears in my rearview mirror.
Quite often, when I’m driving, my worry is validated when the driver does something stupid like tailgates, blows his horn at me to go faster—when I’m already doing ten miles over the posted speed limit—or whips around to pass and then cuts in front of me so sharply I have to brake to keep from smashing into his rear.
At times like that, I hate pickup truck drivers. I know it’s irrational, because drivers of other types of vehicles often do the same thing, and when they do, it upsets me. But, never as much as when someone driving a pickup does it.
There are some childhood traumas you just never grow out of. | NWI
