What ails America can be found in a parking lot.

There are rules and lines in place.

They are not mere suggestions.

Instead they are designed to provide order, enhance safety, and to establish expectations.

Breaking or mocking the rules in a parking lot rarely rise to the state of triggering harm although it happens.

 The usual byproduct of fragrant flaunting of the rules are irritated strangers.

Examples of people thinking they need no stinkin’ rules in parking lots are fairly mundane, but they tick people off.

Ever come across a car that someone parked at an angle straddling two parking spaces to such a degree that you are leery of using a third space adjoining the two because you didn’t trust the yahoo (this actually meant something else before the Internet age) to back up sanely and not act as if he’s behind the wheel of a car in a destruction derby?

They’ve effectively commandeered three spaces when the rules say they are only entitled to one. It’s a passive way of showing it, but they could care less about anyone else but themselves.

Then there are the non-passive jerks. I’ve met them three times in my life.

 It is always on a fairly narrow one-way parking lane filled with cars parked diagonally. You are going the right way. They’re not.

 As you pull closer and to a stop they make it abundantly clear they are not going to back up because they perceive they are entitled not to follow the rules.

All three times after a stand-off lasting perhaps a minute at tops, the other driver — with a least a vicious scowl on his face — backed off. One time the guy flipped me off and started yelling.

It was obvious he was trying to bully his way through. It didn’t work.

Afterwards, I started thinking what if the guy had been genuinely mental, on drugs, or just a raving jerk and had chosen to up the ante. In that case it would have been wiser for me to back up, right?

Not exactly. While you shouldn’t do anything to escalate the situation,  rolling over instantly against any of the three aforementioned maladies would only embolden them to keep pushing you or others.

Rules only work to provide order if we all work to follow them and we don’t allow them to be broken when challenged.

Backing up — whether a driver’s view is blinded by a massive SUV, lifted pickup, van or a higher profile car — calls for that driver and whoever may be driving down the parking lane — to temper the assertion of rules with judgment.

It is obvious the driver backing up more often than not has restricted sight lines as everyone doesn’t drive vehicles with back-up cameras.

At the same time, the driver moving in the parking lane has to be guided by the fact a car could back up into their path at any given time. Both should drive accordingly.

There are situations in life not covered in a nice little collection of words that can assign blame when something goes wrong therefore making certain actions clear cases of black and white. It is why it seems 99.9 percent of time in parking lot crashes insurance companies don’t assign damage.

There are a lot of grey areas in life.

Civilization needs some hard fast rules but in order to work there are a lot of “soft rules” we need to adhere to or the world, neighborhoods and even parking lots will slip into chaos.

How we interact with each other in a parking lot when we disagree is also a microcosm of society.

The best example is how two people have their eyes set on the same parking space.

There are a couple of scenarios.

One is where a motorist clearly was waiting first and the other motorist didn’t notice or chose not to notice. The other — which is rarer — is when two drivers see the spot at the same time and go for it.

And — yes — there is the extremely rare case where there is a true crazy driving like Starsky & Hutch after downing a case of Red Bull zipping through parking lot like the Tasmanian Devil of Looney Tunes fame and cutting drivers off as they are about to pull into a space.

We’re not talking about them.

There’s a special little place reserved for them in Hell where they can do their anti-societal dance in a mirrored room for eternity.

The end result in the best cases are a bruised ego, anger, and smugness. The absolute worst is bruised cars, violence, and a tornado of self-righteousness.

We all have encounters as we go through life that emulate drivers zeroing in on the same parking lot.

How you deal with them sets the tone not just for society but for your own personal mental health.

If you clearly were in the right — and who doesn’t believe they weren’t — why elevate the situation into a clear cut ugly encounter? What good does it do?

And if you were wronged what’s the point of stooping down to the other guy’s level?

Just stay calm and move on down the road.

The problem is few of us anymore when hearing something we disagree with fail to see it from the perspective of the other guy who honestly may believe they are right, sees the situation from a different perspective or is essentially flying blind not paying attention to others and their viewpoints.

Instead of seeing it as a disagreement we seethe.

You gain nothing from it except for higher blood pressure.

This column is the opinion of editor, Dennis Wyatt, and does not necessarily represent the opinions of The Bulletin or 209 Multimedia. He can be reached at dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com