Hurry, keep consuming

 

11/26/2008

 

I keep feeling guilty about driving to work everyday.

This comes from reading Jurassic Park and realizing that I’m using up old dinosaurs at a rate we can’t possibly replace them at.

The solar panel story from yesterday also made me realize just how much I waste, and I can’t figure out a way around the problem.

Cars used to be a relative luxury – who families using one car to get everywhere. Now we’re lucky a family has only two, and some of them serious gas guzzlers.

I try to explain to Sharon how cars really aren’t transportation, but one vast ego trip.

She doesn’t get it because she doesn’t drive.

I’m not sure anybody has done a proper study of cars and status, how the jerks in the pickup trucks think they are tough, while the guys in the Mercedes think they’re important.

But you can tell an asshole well enough ahead of a situation to sometimes avoid a conflict, such as the tinted windowed Honda Civics that spells out urban hoodlums.

My gas station guy is just like me in that he can’t stand driving any more because of all the thoughtless maniacs we have on the road, people who drive cars and SUVs without a care for anyone else. I see them in the grocery store driving carts and secretly thank God that I don’t meet any of them on the streets.

One night leaving here, every street I turned onto had flashing lights and sirens, and the fact surprised me only in that I don’t encounter such situations every night. This morning I saw people backing out of streets, backing down streets, or leaping in front of oncoming traffic with a recklessness that should end them up in the hospital, but for some magical reason, does not. God seems to look out for idiots, I guess.

H.G. Wells basically pointed out that humanity when it becomes safe and content also becomes stupid, since intelligence is a survival mechanism.

I would take public transportation except that the systems aren’t up to the task of getting people to work on time.

Weber, the sociologist, said increasing population puts more and more strain on existing systems, and because we keep popping out children at an-ever increasing rate, our systems are bound to fail.

This is part of the reason why government and the economy are in collapse. They can’t keep up with humanity’s sexual appetite.

America tried to exploit this by turning our nation from a manufacturing and farm economy to one based on consumption – since consuming is what humans do best. But even that system is bound to fail because it is based on too many involved connections: this person must consume so that person can work, and if this other person has no money, he can’t consume so puts yet another person out of work. We thought we would solve it all with credit, giving away the store so that people would continue to consume. But like fossil fuels that reservoir was bound to run dry as people’s consumption out paces their ability to pay for what we consume, and in the end, we can’t borrow enough, and therefore can’t consume enough, and then lose jobs causing us to stop payments on the credit we already used.

In the end, it all falls apart, and people get frustrated as well as stupid.