Is It Just Me?

Gas Junkies

Is it just me, or are we really a nation of junkies?

The Senate just gave another display of amazing backbone by awarding the Bushies and the Oilies with an invitation to despoil one of our few remaining wilderness regions just to hold off the no-gas jags for about as long as it takes for you to read this post.

What is it about us? We seem incapable of seeing ourselves shitting in our own nest. What other animal does that? What twisted sense of values allows us to buy and drive Hummers while at the same time we complain about terrorists from the middle east and prepare to rape another pristine shoreline a little closer to home. It depresses the hell out of me.

I'm no saint. I drive a car that only gets 20-24 miles to the gallon. I even take it to the track occasionally and then I get about 10. So I don't have a lot of room to stand on a soapbox. But there is something about being in traffic, surrounded by these beheamothmobiles, looking out my side window at hubcaps, having some lamebrain on my ass with his eight million candle power quartz hallogen landing lights shining through my rear window right at eye level, that tends to get me pissed off. And why do we drive these things?

I can understand the "guy" thing where compensation is required, but what's the excuse for the well coifed suburban mommy with the cell phone in one hand and the half-gallon starbux in the other? Do we really need that extra ground clearance? I admit that some of those speed bumps can be killers, but come on.

Or maybe we require the four-wheel drive for those days when we JUST HAVE to drive through the inch and a half of slush that fell last night and junior has to get to his clarinet lesson.

Or it could be that we need to feel more secure in this dangerous world of today. I mean who knows when someone might try to fly a jumbo jet into your personal vehicle. It's a proven fact that someone wrapped in six tons of steel has a much better chance of walking away than some eco-freak in a samerai foilmobile.

Well, all I have to say is that I don't know what kind of world I am leaving to my kids. Makes me kind of sad though. That much I do know.

Copyright ©2003-2007 Phaedrous
posted by Phaedrous @ 12:55 PM