ASSISTED CONFRONTATION FOR CAR CRASH VICTIM

Who needs assisted confrontation?

The nice guy who finishes last, that’s who.

Besides, when you assist, and it goes wrong, you’re just trying to help, not hinder.

I knew a nice guy once.

He was a man from work who drove a tiny old Honda, the kind the company broke into the American auto market with.

Big man in a little car.

Driving back from lunch one day a lady blew through a stop sign in Northwest Portland and drilled him.

No one got hurt, but the car looked bad.

I saw it just after it happened while I was walking back to the office.

The woman was a great talker and it sounded like she had him convinced the car crash was his fault.

After a quick survey, and a quick conversation with the good guy, I did some assisted confrontation.

I think he was in shock.

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The man with the wrecked car was at the stage in life where kindness sinks in, where being kind and decent was the goal in every situation. Call it late-thirties.

Sometimes kindness arrives in our minds as a result of regret and failure and blame we once assigned to others.

Then personal responsibility kicks in for some of us, a sense of being accountable for our actions good and bad.

However, it doesn’t show up for everyone at the same time, and for some not at all.

My pal had kindness to spare, which might have been the reason we weren’t better friends.

The woman who crashed him seemed to smell blood in the water like a shark and she started chomping.

My guy looked like he might fold.

Assisted Confrontation Step By Step

I began by establishing the facts. It’s important to know I wasn’t asked to do anything.

I was a volunteer with a history of volunteering.

The case was pretty clear for an amateur sleuth.

There was her car, there was his car, that’s the stop sign, those are the skid marks.

From there I pointed the lady to her responsibility, and how so far she’d missed it.

She came back with a convincing argument for me to mind my own business.

She wasn’t wrong.

But it was also an opportunity to make something right.

So I gave her the shit, like who was she to run into people and say she didn’t? She was already late for wherever she was going after crashing, so why not settle things like normal people.

Do you know what normal people do at a car crash? They check for injuries, exchange info, and go from there.

What they don’t do is go into immediate denial and blame the other person, like the lady I was talking to.

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Since this was a crash everyone could walk away from, drive away from, no one called the police. It was also in time before cell phones.

The lady didn’t want to give her info and prepared to drive away.

Me: Lady, I’ve got your license plate number for the next cop I see and he will consider you a hit and run driver. After listening to you, I don’t think this is the first time. Is that right? Who else have you hit and run besides this guy? Go ahead and leave, but you’ll get a knock on your door later. Have a great day.

After that little speech the crash victim picked it up.

He pulled me aside to tell me to stop, and continued talking to the woman after she decided not to leave the scene of the accident she caused.

My Assisted Confrontation work there was finished.

Normal People Don’t Need Confrontation

Normal people don’t need to be shouted at.

They don’t need cajoling and convincing to do the right thing.

But over the course of time we’ve all been shouted at, cajoled, and convinced, we’ve been wrong about something.

And it plays forward with, “If I can take it, everyone else can too.”

This is when you get people who’ve been slightest even to the smallest degree acting like they’ve had their hemorrhoids pulled out with needle nose pliers.

From politicians who shout and scream about being canceled, left out, ignored, to their constituents who pick up the same thread, confrontation is set.

The sides are set with maga-Americans facing off against the rest of America, the good part.

With that model in place by their sloppy idol, non-confrontational America cows down.

They’d rather stay quiet than engage in the ugly discourse of stolen elections and big lies.

The fact that a washed up reality TV star could be foisted on the American public as a solution to world problems is all the more reason to sharpen your assisted confrontation skills.

Use those skills as lifesaving for someone caught in the undertow of the bullshit wave that crashed over the country and keeps stinking.

Do you smell something ‘funny?’