Here’s a cute little article about hybrid cars and the people who hate them.
It’s perhaps a little embarassing to admit it, but there’s a milestone in the development of my social conscience that was placed by Dennis Leary. Everyone in my generation is familiar, I think, with his song Asshole
:
You know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna get myself a 1967 Cadillac El Dorado Convertible. Hot pink! With whale-skin hub caps, an all leather cow interior, and big brown baby seal eyes for headlights. YEAH! And I’m gonna drive around in that baby, at 115 miles per hour, getting one mile per gallon, sucking down quarter pounder cheeseburgers from McDonalds in the old-fasioned non-biodegradable styrafoam containers. And when I’m done sucking down those grease ball burgers, I’m gonna wipe my mouth in the American flag, and then I’m gonna toss the styrafoam containers right out the side, and there ain’t a God damn thing anybody can do about it, you know why? ‘Cause we got the bombs, that’s why.
Satire, of course, but satire that’s to the point. Our culture takes a certain pride in wastefulness: not always — indeed, not generally — as an end in itself, but as a byproduct of making things bigger, having more. Bucking this trend — acting and shopping locally, refusing to own a car, living with simplicity — is looked at as being just a bit odd by many of one’s fellows. Why would one sacrifice the convenience of going to the Super Wal-Mart in favour of doing one’s shopping at half a dozen locally-owned shops? Particularly is one’s going to be walking or cycling around town to do it? It doesn’t make any sense if one’s conception of economic utility relates only to one’s own finances and convenience.
While I can hardly claim to live waste-free — I’ve got a ways to go before I’ve recaptured the simple life — I do try to be conscious of the choices I’m making about such things. My own decision to buy a hybrid vehicle (two years ago, which I guess makes me an early adopter on this continent) was influenced by that consciousness. If that makes me a do-gooder
, then fine. I think the world could use a little more good being done.