[AOX81]

Holiday breaks are great. What all of this time off has done for me besides keeping me from refilling my bank accounts and giving me a reason to not go to the gym (at all) is that it has allowed me to keep up on current events. Today I got online to check my spam, er, e-mail, and in my AOL welcome window I saw a brief pop-up of something quite disturbing: hippies and the damage they can cause when they get temporarily bored with smoking pot and hugging trees.
Apparently, some members of a loosely organized group that calls themselves the Earth Liberation Front decided to go ahead and torch a pick-up truck and two SUV’s at a Girard, Pennsylvania car dealership. And, in typical hippie fashion, they did a really shitty job. According to FBI reports, jugs of gasoline positioned underneath the trucks caused the fires. Six were supposed to burn and only 3 did, plus a nearby car. This just proves that these rod-munchers could throw a brick at the floor and miss. Not only that, but while they managed to stop a whopping 3 trucks from ever creating damaging green house gases again, they managed to pollute the air just the same by burning several hundred pounds of rubber and plastic. So, how does one become a member of this destructive, retarded orangutan hippie club? Well, that’s the easy part. According to the FBI, all you have to do is commit an act of eco-terrorism and claim it in the name of the Earth Liberation Front. Wow. I think there was more involved when I joined the fucking LEGO Builder’s Club when I was six. Plus LEGO sent me a membership certificate. I’m sure the hippies would do the same except they’d weave your certificate out of hemp, rather than sacrifice a helpless tree.
The essential problem is simple: hippies are dumb. They fail to realize that environment-saving steps have to be implemented slowly and as the public is ready for them. States like California (a true liberal’s playground) are pushing harder and harder for automobile manufacturers to lower emissions and to have a certain percentage of their sales made up of electric and hybrid vehicles. Great idea. Except the majority of the buying public doesn’t want an electric car. I know I sure don’t. Remember the EV1? Yeah, the electric car that GM sold for four years, starting in the mid nineties, and then killed because no one bought them. If manufacturers are forced to reduce emissions from SUV’s and trucks, one of two things will happen. One: the already exorbitant prices of these vehicles will go through the roof. Two: we’ll get to revisit the seventies and drive vehicles that are deprived of power and choked by emissions controls. Hell, both of these events may occur. And as soon as you reduce the power of a truck, or stab an electric engine in it, it loses all usefulness as a truck. Where I grew up, trucks are run harder and put away more wet than a 10-cent hooker. The body panels get scratched and beat in. The beds are full of scars from chains, firewood, rocks and garden tools. They are required to tow and haul more than GM, Ford and Dodge ever even consider safely rating them for. And they are required to put with all of this without a whimper and without fault. With alternatively fueled vehicles still a few years out, the world needs to stick with the gasoline-powered internal combustion engine for its combustion efficiency and for its power.
If states like California are able to pass such strict emissions laws, American auto manufacturers will be hurt worse than a Chinese buffet after a visit from Oprah. People outside of Michigan don’t often realize what a great role the Big Three play in everyone’s lives. General Motors directly employs over 350,000 people. Add to that employees of spin-offs Delphi and EDS and all of its various and sundry suppliers and you’re talking about a lot of jobs in this country. In the words of former GM lobbyist Tom Kay, “General Motors wouldn’t be doing anyone any favors by going out of business.”
Hippies hate capitalism and they hate that people spend large sums of money on lavish sport utility vehicles when they could be driving a little pussy Honda Insight, singing Kum-By-Fucking-Yah, and donating their spare gas money towards saving some spotted, red-breasted, bug-eyed, green-assed bird that lives near the ski-areas in Vail. What their tiny little hippie brains prevent them from realizing is that every time they burn a truck, or burn a ski lodge, or push everyone in the state of California to drive a Prius, they are shooting the country they’re working so hard to save right in the goddamn foot. To all the eco-terrorist, hippie tree-huggers out there, I have this to say: don’t set foot near my truck with a jug of gasoline or you’ll get a chance to personally ask Jesus what he would drive.