Good idea for a Good Friday

Hope you've been able to relax a little this week of Spring Break. And with Easter just ahead, this also seems an appropriate time to suggest a gentle stress buster. It's so simple, anybody can do it. Anybody with a driver's license, anyway. And if enough people start doing this routinely, it just might reach pleasant epidemic proportions.

Hope you've been able to relax a little this week of Spring Break.

And with Easter just ahead, this also seems an appropriate time to suggest a gentle stress buster. It's so simple, anybody can do it. Anybody with a driver's license, anyway.

And if enough people start doing this routinely, it just might reach pleasant epidemic proportions.

Here's all it takes to get some good feelings going:

When you see a car at a stop sign or a driveway about to pull out ahead of you, slow down. If you're feeling extremely generous, slow down and smile. Let them pull out without having to hit their accelerator hard. Let them cut ahead of you - and make them feel OK about it.

We know. That's counterintuitive to many drivers. When somebody pulls out just far enough ahead of you that you're forced to slow down, that's an act of disrespect, isn't it? Or at least, an example of poor driver judgment? The natural reaction from many of us is not to smile but to gesture with a certain digit and to speed up. We want to climb right up on that jerk's tail to let him or her know in no uncertain terms how egregious their traffic discourtesy has been to us; how downright dangerous, in fact.

Well, baloney. The vast majority of the time it is at least as easy to slow down and let them pull into the stream of traffic ahead of us as it is to speed up, trying to block their entry.

We're serious. Slow down. Smile. Let's all agree to make this Good Friday a very good Friday. Let's start a trend of driver courtesy and just see what happens. Our bet is that you'll be reminded of a timeless truth: a little kindness goes a long, long way.