Blogging, so different from the staid old dame of print magazine culture, has me thinking about the issue of politeness. One is told to be “thick skinned” to get along in this new game. Thick skin is skin imperviousness to the arrows that come by Night, and the Christian who trusts in God has that.

There’s a lot I like about blogging, being a neophyte to the form. I like that the reader gets an equal (and often much more than equal) say on the topic at hand. It suits my sensibilities as a wallflower and person with sober judgment about my modest abilities.

I liked one commenter’s analogy to “road rage.” Road rage, there’s another mystery. My guess is that we have road rage — say, as opposed to pedestrian rage — because the buffer of chrome and glass between car-sheathed people has a dehumanizing effect.

I have just reviewed with profit an old bit of advice from Francis Schaeffer:

Every man is my neighbor and is to be treated in a proper human, man-to-man relationship. Every time we act in a machine-like way toward another man we deny the central teaching of the Word of God — that there is a personal God who has created man in his own image.

The woman at the cash register is your sister first, the cashier second. So is the blogger.

After my son totaled the Volvo I’m back to a stick shift Volkswagen for the first time since I learned to drive on my mother’s Karmann Ghia in 1968. What has changed in the intervening decades is the ascendance of the automatic transmission. The world around me seems to have no collective memory of the different rhythm of driving required by the old clutch.

Philadelphia drivers are like Philadelphia sports fans: obnoxious. They’re on the horn the nanosecond the light turns red. This is not a fortuitous combination with the slow-out-of-the-gate manual. Romans are even more boisterous horn-blowers, by the way, but they don’t mean it in a nasty way; they’re just Italian.

Driving a ’96 Jetta you are like a handicapped person. Or like a person with a fish bowl on the seat that you’re bringing home for little Johnny’s birthday. But the motorist behind you cannot see the fish bowl — or understand stick shift issues — and he is not sympathetic.

But what about me? How many times have a written someone off, or “blown my horn” at him, or been annoyed at him or disliked him, totally oblivious to the fact that he has, as it were, a fish bowl on his seat?

Cataclysmic developments on the horizon announce themselves in the smallest portents — the canary exiting the coal mine; the child’s marble that rolls off a table in “Titanic” before any passenger knows of his doom.

Still meditating on mall parking lots, I have become conscious of my habit of hunting down the closest spot available. I do not stoop to snatching “handicapped parking”— but not out of any compassion for the handicapped; it’s consequences of the law I have in mind.

If there were not a law, would I ever, on my own, think of leaving the best spaces for the infirm and elderly and young mothers with toddlers hanging on the arm? It’s a moot point; the law by its very existence creates a legal mindset, robbing the oxygen of any other motivation. It renders moral reckoning superfluous. Where laws multiply, the moral muscle goes flaccid.

Trace the dots from the microcosm of parking lot habits to the decline of Western Civilization.

“Every conflict is solved according to the letter of the law and this is considered to be the ultimate solution. If one is right from a legal point of view, nothing more is required. Nobody may mention that one could still not be entirely right, and urge self-restraint or a renunciation of these rights, call for sacrifice and selfless risk: this would simply sound absurd. Voluntary self-restraint is almost unheard of; everyone strives toward further expansion to the extreme limit of the legal frames.” (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)