Disarming Innocence

I was driving my son to his school today.  A car in front of us switched lanes without checking the oncoming traffic in that lane. This caused a pickup truck in that lane to suddenly brake for this car to avoid collision. The truck driver let out his anger with a loud honk for the car which cut his vehicle abruptly.  I laughed on hearing his honking.

My son noticed my laughter but was not aware of the traffic scene I just saw. He asked why I laughed. I told him that a truck driver got mad because a car cut him abruptly and that he had to brake hard and hence was mad and honked.  Without missing a beat, he asked " so what is funny about it ?"

I was taken by surprise as I did not expect this question from him. For a while, I was desperately searching for words on how to answer this seemingly plain question. In the first place, I had actually laughed at the trouble of a couple of unknown people driving near me. Though harmless, frankly speaking, it was an insensitive reaction on my part. Instead of even thinking about what could have happened if they collided, all I could muster was a indifferent sadistic laughter. Agree that its not the end of the world, just a minor thing, that's how world is etc etc. But the very fact that my son's innocent mind did not find it funny while I laughed at it, made me cringe as I reflected upon how my mind has stooped low enough to elicit a laughter out of such things. Even after a couple of minutes, I couldn't come up with a convincing explanation and in fact, I did not want to explain why I laughed - for two reasons - one, I felt bad about myself and two, I did not want to curb his innocence. I just kept on driving.

Snow flakes and rain drops are often used to emphasize purity or innocence. Incidentally, it was raining today when I was driving him to school. I was still contemplating on the incident when I shot the attached pic of rain drops.