If all goes well, by the end of the year, this will be my new car:
Actually, my new car will be black, but that’s not important right now. What’s important is that I’ll have one of the first mass-produced, electric cars in the country — at least since they killed the last electric car program. But that’s not important right now. What is important is that I’ll be able to give the finger to those fuckers who are currently dumping 200,000 gallons of oil each day into the Gulf of Mexico (and, yes, that’s officially the first time I’ve used the F-word in this blog — I wanted to make it count).
I am street-rat crazy over this oil spill. I almost can’t read about the destruction it’s going to cause because it makes me physically ill. Today I came up with this analogy: imagine a raw sewage line has broken in the middle of your town and is flooding the streets. There’s no way to turn it off, and you have no idea when it’s going to stop. And just to make things a little more interesting, the roads are closed, the grocery stores and restaurants are covered with the stuff, and your newborn baby has to sleep in it.
In 1979, President Jimmy Carter installed solar panels on the roof of the White House. Seven years later, Ronald Reagan took them down. When I think about where our country would be — could be — if we’d taken serious steps toward alternative energy over the last 30 years, it makes me want to punch a Baby Boomer. Even if you hate the earth and don’t believe in global warming, you can’t dispute the national security impact of our dependence on foreign oil. We seem to be hanging onto this dinosaur of an energy source (pardon the pun) out of pure stubbornness. We should be the world leader on this, and instead, it’s Denmark. Denmark!
I honestly don’t know what it’s going to take. Maybe when Republican senators can’t get oysters and shrimp cocktails anymore. Or when hunters run out of stuff to shoot. Or when vacationers on cruise ships are inconvenienced by having to go around the giant slick to get to Disney World.
Don’t ask me for answers. I’m just trying to stay calm, stop googling “gulf oil spill,” and concentrate on my car. It works almost as well as chanting “Aum.”
“Nissan Leaf. . . Nissan Leaf. . . Nissan Leaf. . . “
Tammy Soong is a writer, wife, and mom from Reno, Nevada. She takes an absurd amount of pain medication, but not enough to have actually named her children "Newt" and "Elfie." She spends most days stressing out over clutter, writing stuff for this place, and working on podcasts with her gal pals, the Blogging Betties.