All right, that’s it—I’m pulling this car over.

Like the fictitious Sean Thornton, I’m what you call a quiet, peace-lovin‘ man. It’s not very often I engage in pointless, heated arguments with someone who will never see my point of view anyway. Just ask my sister.

But some of the happenings Wednesday during the international “Day of Posturing” has got my dander up to record highs.

Of course, no one really knows what a dander is, but it generally rises in direct proportion to anger. Despite recent breakthroughs in dander research, scientists are still not sure if dander fluxuation is affected by any other form of erotica.

But I lost it Wednesday. When I was younger, I lost my temper too often. I once broke my hand trying to open a refrigerator door by punching it on the side—and although I make light of it here, I’ll always be ashamed of myself for doing it. I learned to control my temper before it controlled me.

O.K., all right—I’m getting to it. What got me mad Wednesday wasn’t the protesters or what they were protesting or how they were protesting. And it wasn’t that many of them looked to be in dire need of a shower.

It was the swearing.

Don’t be stupid—I swear just as often as any city kid whose father’s two favorite words are “Ah, bull—-!” But I observe certain rules of decorum, one of which is you don’t swear in front of a lady. Unless, of course, she cusses you out first.

ere’s another helpful hint of when not to swear: When you’re part of one emotional mob confronting another emotional mob. You’ll gain a new appreciation for the word “elevation” if you do something that stupid.

When the activist-types came tramping over to our humble, ugly-green cottage to admonish my buddy Dave and whoever else they could get their tongues on, they were well within their rights to stand in the parking lot and engage us in lively debate, if we—get out your dictionaries—acquiesced.

And we did go along with it. I jumped up on Chris Whildin’s poor Oldsmobile and, as you may have already guessed, tried to joke around with what I thought was an intelligent bunch of college students.

“We want Dave!,” they chanted, which is understandable—he is good looking, in an off-beat sort of way. I had no idea where the boy was, so I said, “Dorothy isn’t here!” No one laughed. I guess it’s been awhile since we’ve seen “The Wizard of Oz.”

Anyway, to make a boring story more exciting and heroic, Dave soon leapt beside me on the car. That’s when the swearing started. I’ve known the guy for over a year and I’ve never seen him elicit such a reaction.

Ah, yes—it was the peace-activist Jim Fabric who started the ugliness. He called Dave a “Mother ——.” When I invited him to watch his mouth, Fabric called me the same thing. I taunted back, but with a clean mouth—honest to goodness, I did. Around that time, some other peace-person called me a bodily orifice, only he used an earthier term.

As stupid as it may sound, considering we were outnumbered, I did the old jumping-off-the-car routine, challenging all comers. The truth is, I wasn’t about to land my backside in jail for pounding some isolated idiot activists.

So why did I jump off the car? Think about it. We’ve all read or heard Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Here was a man who had bricks thrown at him, who spent days in inhospitable jails. Did he say, “I have a (deleted) dream this day. I have dream that all those (relative-fornicating) white-trash (waste-heads) will (foul, filth, garbage garbage garbage)….”

Dr. King went trough more hell for his cause than any of these psuedo flower-children—who also marched through Wirtz Hall shouting “—-ing Yuppies” into classrooms—will ever go through. Yet, no one ever heard King belittle himself and his cause by putting his mouth in the gutter.

Oooh, I’m tellin‘ ya—I’m still mad. No, wait—I see it’s Friday: have fun, but keep it clean. Remember, you kiss your mother with that mouth.