To The Carbabies

[This was from about 2003 when http://changingtheclimate.org was more radical...]

To the Carbabies:

Wastefulness is as American as Apple Pie! Throw it away! There's ALWAYS More!

What better way to compensate for being shallow and empty than to drive around in a prosthetic body extension that multiplies your personal real estate by a factor of 40 or 50?

Wallow in your big shiny status symbol, seal yourself off from the inferior masses, and thumb your nose at contemptible pedestrians.

Eliminate nagging doubts about the worth of your existence by pressing the gas pedal, and leaving them in your dust.

Seal yourself off from everything around you; experience the world through glass, metal, and filtered air.

Dive into the seething rivers of steel and wait; enjoy your wait with your cell phone, your laptop, your cd player. Do not connect with all of the other individuals waiting in their cars; do not make eye contact.

Drug yourself with prozac, nicotine, and a million other things, so you can ignore the famed Black Forest in Germany that is dead from acid rain, or the air in Mexico City that is so filthy that you can catch hepatitis from breathing. Turn up the volume on your 6 disc cd player so you can forget the thousands of wells in India that are poisoned with cyanide, the Black Sea in Russia, which is dying, or Semipalitinsk, where radiation deformities plague locals 30 years after the experiments.

Adjust your electric seat to distract you from thinking about what it will be like here in 20, 40, or 100 years, when it is as crowded as China, when there is no intelligent government, and everything is as trashed out as it is in Mexico, Russia, or India.

Flash your foglights at the idiot in front of you to remind you that you will somehow be lucky or rich enough to escape to one of the enclaves of cleanliness and order that will remain in the sea of trash.

Look around and luxuriate in all of the space inside your vehicle that is distinctly YOURS, and remember that everyone is implicated; everyone who eats or uses a toothbrush is part of the transportation grid. If you sneeze you're a polluter. Why try to streamline? Burn it up! You Worked for it. You Deserve it.

The two largest corporations in the world are General Motors and Exxon. Carbabies should be sent to a planet entirely paved with John Elway parking lots jammed with idling Excursions, Tahoes, and Suburbans, to give them a glimpse of the world they are creating.

Put a sticker on Every One of 'em.