unless we live in California. We drive SUVs while
people in Europe are cramming themselves into tiny cars like the ones a dozen clowns try to squeeze
into at a circus.
A few years ago someone asked me, “What’s it gonna take to curb our oil usage?” I told them it would
take more than global warming, more than war, more than the availability of alternative fuels. I said it
would take very high gas prices. How high? Well, a lot higher than they are now.
We’re bitching, but how many of us have bought a hybrid? How many of us have written our local
congressman or senator to ask why we don’t have electric cars? How many of us have done enough
research to discover that this whole hydrogen fuel cell campaign was put together by the same people
who bought up the battery patents for electric cars and then chose to sit on the technology so it can’t
be used for another 12 years? How many people really understand that biofuel from corn is a worse
idea than what we are doing now?
Until we are paying the true cost of gasoline, including the environmental cleanup and the health
care costs associated with pollution, we will continue to drive like there is no tomorrow.
I was at the gas station in South Georgia when I overheard a guy talking about how he was thinking
of trading in his pickup truck for a hybrid. I couldn’t help but smile. When a guy who wears a cap that
says, “I’d rather push a Ford than drive a Chevy,” —a guy who drives a new Ford F 150 pickup with a
gun rack, a confederate flag on the rear window, and a McCain bumper sticker—talks about trading in
his truck for a hybrid, there’s hope for us all.
Dayton