Let’s just see how well you absorb what you read.
I wasn’t out on the road long at all, the other morning, when I passed a tiny fast-moving automobile. I recognized it immediately as a seldom-seen Austin-Healey “bug-eye” Sprite. I hadn’t reached the open highway yet but the other driver seemed intent on tripling the thirty-five mile-an-hour speed limit, as the growling engine wound up to a scream. As I was on my way to work and the guy was headed toward the residential area I had come from, I wondered, did this guy have a day off or was he, perhaps, independently wealthy? Top down in the morning mist, wearing a baseball cap and revving the heart out of the engine of a rare and expensive sports car. What a life, right? Must be nice.
My drive to and from work is fairly long, and I had time to think - almost always a dangerous thing to be doing. Like most people who should probably know better, I did it anyway. The topic of nearly the entire drive that morning became, generally, the many things about the world and about people that I do not understand.
For example, we all know, or should know, that the planet is warming. I know a whole lot of meteorologists and earth scientists, and some time ago I began asking their opinions. None of them ever disagreed that it is. There isn’t room or time enough here to get into the silly argument about why it’s warming, in part because it doesn’t matter why. If you can’t accept that humanity is behind it, then try to accept that the massive daily release of hydrocarbons to which we all contribute, isn’t helping.
So tell me, why are all of the full-sized pickup trucks manufactured today, one and a half times the size and weight of full-sized pickups of two decades ago? If it isn’t style, then what the hell is it? Don’t bother to tell me about the fuel-efficiency of newer vehicles. For the most part, it’s pure hype. That means, in plain language, it’s not just a lie, it’s a damn lie.
I should think that most of us have seen the videos of glaciers breaking up and dropping into the sea, and the time-lapse maps of formerly ice-covered areas that are now dry land. Instead of embracing the obvious direction and inevitable effects of unstable weather patterns and ocean-inundated coastlines, we buy bigger and more powerful vehicles. And we drive faster. Pretty much all of us do it. A few of us have hybrid vehicles, or fully electric vehicles that plug in and recharge. Foolish people. Energy conversion from coal or gas-generated steam to electricity is inefficient. Then we convert it back to mechanical energy, thinking we’re helping to save the planet. More inefficiency. I’ve got news, your carbon footprint is enlarged by your electric car, not reduced. I’ve little doubt that you’ve heard it here first. That doesn’t make it untrue.
I do understand that young people entering the workforce are underpaid. Anyone who believes that economic globalization hasn’t exerted great downward pressure on wages in the United States is a damn fool. So who is it that buys, and runs, those motor homes built on a Mercedes chassis? Good heavens, could it be you former hippies, you ultraliberal-types who now happen to have the cash?
I admit, I have and drive a car every day, myself. But I still don’t understand. Instead of seeking change or demanding change or voting with our wallets when we make a purchase, it looks a lot more like a final party before the collapse of civilization. Former hippies should be good at that.
Our inconsistencies are reflected by far more than the vehicles we drive or how we drive them. Recently I went for a haircut, and the sporting goods catalog from the ‘zine table in the barbershop contained an item that actually made me laugh out loud. I had to explain that to the somewhat overweight barber, who didn’t seem to be nearly as amused by it as I was. I wonder why.
“Survival Bacon!” The ad read. It’s in a sealed can, there’s a lot of it in that single can, it keeps for ten years, and it’s the real thing!
Well now I can’t speak for anyone else, but I haven’t eaten a strip of bacon for decades, and I’m still alive. If I can believe anything at all about the effects of fat content and saturated fats and processed meats, in fact, I will probably live longer without it than with it. If I’m packing away subsistence foodstuffs for an apocalypse, there probably won’t be a single can of “survival bacon” in there. But, hey. I’ll bet they’re selling literally tons of the stuff. Thus came a shift in my thinking, away from things I didn’t understand. So maybe I do understand, after all, about everything. It isn’t about the planet, folks. It’s about the money. Well, now. There’s a surprise.
There is someone out there, or a team of someones, whom we all need. We need to find and identify the person or persons who are responsible for the marketing effort behind bacon. What a job they’ve done! It doesn’t seem like it was that long ago when bacon was universally recognized as a food that is bad for you, that clogs arteries and increases cancer risk and weighs heavily against long-term functioning of the human heart. Today there are “memes” on the internet about “keeping” those women who are willing to serve their men bacon and beer. It used to be beer and peanuts, folks. Now it’s beer and bacon. Oh, I know it tastes good, I remember that, but it isn’t addictive. We need the people who have effectively popularized it to turn their attention toward popularizing new funding for science, because honestly, good science is humanity’s only hope.
But since it’s all about the money, and frankly, all about the self, there would probably be no point at all in expanding my written observations into the world of privacy, which actually left our world some time ago. All efforts to stem the loss of it were stopgap, totally ineffective, poo-pooed and minimized, and that battle has been lost. A geoscientist informed me that the polar bears are fucked too, his words. No efforts will be made to control or correct our carbon-emitting excesses until someone important loses money over it.
Things will never change, unless we make them change.
So, as I at long last turned into the parking lot at my workplace, one final thought arose in my mind that I still don’t understand.
What the hell was keeping that guy’s baseball cap on his head?
