If you ever have the fortune of having enough free time to go to political events, you’ll notice they have you register as a supporter when you walk in. One of these events put me on the Obama campaign call list, and as such, every once in a while I get phone calls from random people reminding me of events to attend in my area that will help support the candidate.

After being notified about the famous annual Tom Harkin Steak Fry and the Obama rally beforehand, I decided it would be a spectacular event, and since I likely would support most speakers there, a good day.

But that day alerted me to a problem that keeps popping up. This really annoying synchronicity happens to be traffic, which leads me to believe there’s a weird omnipresent phenomenon controlling automobiles and bad drivers. And this phenomenon really ticked off the friend I brought who paid $30 for a ticket.

The steak fry was in Indianola, a good hour’s drive away from my house, and although we left a little bit late, it wouldn’t have mattered in the long run. On Highway 65, upon approaching this humble town, hundreds of signs for Hillary and Obama littered – or rather, stood proudly – on lawns and shoulders. Literally 50 signs would be lined up in a row, little bursts of excess. This should’ve been my first clue that we were about to be pretty peeved.

Shortly after we rolled into town, traffic was at a standstill. Not having been here before, I assumed that is was all for the event. If it wasn’t, I would have to be on guard to see which lane my directions needed me to be in to make my crucial turn – probably the same thought of every driver around me.

After 10 minutes of this, my impatient self turned off into a Subway for some cheap deliciousness, and I had the privilege to just watch the gridlock. There are streetlights every block or so, but it really doesn’t seem to matter when the last person before the red tries to hurry across and leaves their tail end in the intersection. And then nobody moves for the duration of the light.

My friend and I watched as little girls jumped out of minivans to steal a yard sign for overenthused parents, young men hopped out looking for available bathrooms, clearly approving the measure of putting yourself in park and just getting out to walk around. I concluded that traffic = idiots.

What’s worse is that we sat talking after eating our food for about an hour, and there was no end in sight to the lines of heavily bumper-stickered automobiles.

It had to be at least two hours into the actual event now, and I had to wonder how many people would actually be showing up. It was held in the balloon fields, a place with a great amount of space, but I was still pretty surprised.

In hindsight, what’s much worse is the fact that the Subway employees couldn’t give us decent directions to a gas station or a way out of town without sitting in my car for another hour. What’s a rally worth anyway? We got the heck out of there.

That traffic kills all my enthusiasm for any kind of looked-forward-to event seems to be unique to my own brain, as people will sit for hours in cars, some of which I’m sure have no air or heat, to go sit somewhere else for a few hours. The ridiculousness of traffic is only due to 90 percent of people on the road having enough patience or appreciation for their goal that it doesn’t wear off. Isn’t that ironic?

All the people who try to change lanes when there’s no room, cutting you off, running red lights, putting themselves in park and generally doing stupid things should really equal disaster. It reminded me of traffic on football game day in Ames, except while I would think college students would pull more stunts, it’s usually pretty tame, even with the streetlights being nonoperational.

I wonder how many other people decided they’d had enough and just turned around to go somewhere else, like me. Is this the side effect of our overpopulation, our American excess and entitlement, or maybe even proof that politics does in fact cause global warming?

I wish. It’s really just evidence that progress is never perfection, and when faced with adversity, modern man leaves his brain in the backseat, next to the screaming kids and stolen yard signs.

Luci Van Scoy is a junior in anthropology from Newton.