Draft SUV Drivers First

In East Sacramento I was behind a Toyota Prius today with a license plate frame from Berkeley, but more interestingly, with a bumper sticker that said "Draft SUV Drivers First." Driven by a solo white guy. No surprise there; I would have been floored if the driver was a West Asian woman.

In my little opinion, I seriously question that the choice of rig is what matters. In the grand scheme of things it's a minor point.

Presumably if we somehow converted our vehicular fleet of 62 million to foreign sourced hybrids we'd never need to engage in foreign wars. Really? Our waring nation wouldn't engage in wars anymore? Is this the premise of that bumper sticker? Or is it something more?

Our contemptuous attitudes towards each other, our low density suburban slum blowout from Berkeley to Boston, our crush of traffic, our destruction of open land, our building of cities and towns to the scale of the Prius instead of the scale of the human, the need for solo motoring at all costs to avoid others, and the waves of pedestrian deaths that will ensue due to inattentive hybrid drivers and their silent propulsion -- not one of these would in any way be mitigated by selling your Yukon and opting for a hybrid.

So, Al Gore's son is exempt because he's driving a Prius. No matter that he was driving in excess of 100 mph in Orange County. He's exempt because of what he drove, but the 17-year old attentive driver borrowing her parent's Tahoe goin' the speed limit to the high school prom? Send that pig to Afghanistan!

So, driving a Prius daily from Berkeley to Sacramento (23,000 miles a year) should exempt some white guy's son from military service, but a brown South Sacramentan woman who bought a used Jeep Cherokee and who drives it less than 1,500 miles a year -- send that bitch to die in Tora Bora!

This is an amazingly stupid bumper sticker. I could just as well plaster a sign on my bicycle tomorrow with the slogan "No Soldiers Died to Fuel This Bike, but Thousands of Iraqis Died to Fuel Your Prius." You think your precious Prius is powered from a separate, special pool of oil? Think your fuel to drive in Berkeley comes from an environmentally friendly well in the Bay Area? No! It comes from the same ravaged Nigerian coastline that fuels your SUV driving neighbor. Think your batteries are produced in a wholly environmentally responsible manner? Think your batteries, the same batteries that will need replacement in 2016, will be disposed of in a correct manner? Think your cheap Chinese tires are manufactured with the same tender loving care that our own tire manufacturers provide?

A fine example of how pretentious our American Prius drivers are. So special they are. So environmentally superior. So deserving of meritorious recognition. Get out there and walk, slick, if you're so damn vain, and put your life at risk pedestrianating alongside all those other Prius drivers who'll run you down while blackberrying, and then tell me how distinctive you ought to be for saving the world.