Once upon a time there was a bus driving down the street. It was the biggest and shiniest bus of them all, and it was driven by a cheerful, likable fellow who knew all the places the bus needed to go and the most efficient ways of getting there. He certainly wasn't perfect -- maybe there were a few times he should have been watching the road when he was talking to one of the passengers -- but all in all he was one of the best drivers the bus had ever had.
One day that bus driver retired, and the new bus driver told all the passengers, "That was one of the worst bus drivers you ever had. We're going to do everything differently now."
The passengers were a little confused, but they figured, hey, if he's the bus driver, he must know what he's talking about. So they all waited to see what the new driver would do, and watched with some curiosity as the new driver went backwards and made a number of wrong-way turns on one-way streets. Often, the bus driver would put the bus on cruise control and take a nap. This didn't worry the passengers too much, since the bus had been traveling so smoothly for so long, it seemed like it barely needed a driver at all.
One morning, while the bus was idling at a stoplight, some people from a different bus threw a rock through one of the windows. Over 3,000 passengers were cut by flying glass. (It was a very large bus.)
The people were shocked and angry. "We've got to get the people who threw that rock!" they shouted. And the bus driver promptly found the other bus, the one that had the people who threw the rock, and rammed it, and that bus fell over on its side, and most of the people inside that bus climbed out the windows and started to run away.
"Let's get 'em!" shouted the people.
"Wait," said the bus driver. "Look, over there, at that OTHER bus."
The people looked over at the third bus. It didn't look like anything special. The wheels were sort of falling off, it could barely go half the speed limit, and the engine was sputtering something fierce.
"What about it?" said the people.
"The driver of that bus has rocks too," said the bus driver, "and they're much BIGGER and more DANGEROUS rocks. And I hear he's been talking to the people who threw the first rocks. We must ram that bus immediately."
A small group of people sitting in the very back were rather skeptical. "What makes you think he really has these dangerous rocks? Even if he does have those rocks, why would he want to throw them at us? Isn't it more important to get the people who just ran out of the other bus, since they're the ones who actually threw rocks at us? Aren't there better things to do with our bus than use it as a battering ram, anyway?"
"Why do you hate this bus so much?" asked the bus driver.
"RAM THEM. RAM THEM!" shouted the rest of the passengers.
So they did. They barreled into the third bus at top speed, and sure enough, it fell over on its side too. Except that this time, the impact blew the two front tires of the ramming bus, put serious cracks in the windshield and threw a rod in the engine, and the bus driver found himself unable to move, impotently spinning his wheels with the now-heavily damaged front end of his bus stuck solidly in the chassis of the other.
"Feels good! Mission accomplished!" hooted the bus driver.
After a while, the people in the back of the bus noticed that nobody had really gotten out of the third bus, and that no rocks, big, dangerous or otherwise, could be seen through its shattered windows.
"Where are all those big dangerous rocks you said they had?"
"I know where the rocks are," said the bus driver. "They're in the area around the driver's seat, and east, west, south and north somewhat."
So some of the passengers from the bus got off and boarded the bus they'd just rammed. It took them a while, but they finally found the other bus driver, and they brought his fuzzy dice back to the other bus driver so that he could hang them from his rear-view mirror as a trophy. But they didn't find any rocks, and in fact they found that most of those other passengers were pretty unhappy about getting rammed and boarded, and just wanted them to get the hell off their bus and leave them alone. And while they tried to fix the bus (which, as it turned out, was incredibly rickety and unreliable and had only been held together by the know-how of the previous bus driver), people from the SECOND bus, the one that had originally thrown the rocks at them and then run away, showed up and started throwing more rocks at everybody. On top of that, many of the other people who had escaped the second bus had secretly boarded other buses, and were throwing rocks at those passengers too.
Finally one of the passengers on the original bus, the bus that this story is really all about, stood up and said, "This is ridiculous! Our driver has made horrible decisions that has left our bus and roads in much worse shape than they should be! I want my bus back!"
"Yeah! Damn right!" shouted the passengers in the back. But the majority of the passengers couldn't figure out why that particular passenger seemed so angry, and eventually a different passenger stood up and declared that he and his friend would fight for a stronger bus.
The bus driver had had enough of this. He stood up with all of his friends in front of the bus and said: "That guy isn't going to protect you from any rocks. If he drives the bus, the danger is that you'll get hit by rocks again. Let him drive the bus, and you're choosing to get hit by rocks. Rocks, rocks, rocks. Fear the rocks."
"That's retarded," said the passengers in the back. "There were much less rocks being thrown before you decided to ram that last bus. Remember? Our bus is stuck. It's nearly broken down. All the rest of the buses on the road can't stand us. Just about every action you've taken has increased the chances of our getting hit with more rocks. Seriously, dude, WTF." But the majority of the other passengers were incapable of applying logical analysis to a statement, and rallied behind the bus driver.
This is not the end of the story. I hope.