bar the door

as I was saying in yesterday's entry,

An incident (or non-incident) which was only vaguely off-putting and creepy, about five years ago, caused me to begin the habit of locking my driver's side door, every time, right after getting into the car. And then a year later, a person who was mad about parking space (or maybe other stuff, too) tried to attack my driver's side door after I got in, and I was very glad I'd locked it.

This spaced-out sequence of events made me ask, in my mind,
"What is the matter with
this guy?
people?
this town?
our society?
the world?
____ ?"

The second incident left me very shaken-up, but I told myself firmly at the time, "Hey thank goodness the first guy, from a year before, was rude and obnoxious, because it prompted me to take a precaution which protected me from the second guy who was, rather than only rude and obnoxious, possibly -- I don't know -- homicidal ??

Maybe I should go around thanking all the obnoxious and rude people for helping me learn to protect myself from the homicidal ones.
??
Is that what Norman Vincent Peale meant by "the power of positive thinking"?

-30-