One more reason to hate cars

My latest reason for hating cars

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They are God awful expensive. I don't know when it happened but I really don't like spending money. I have so little, I tend to be very finicky about who gets it and why.

On Sunday I was driving (this was my first mistake) to visit a friend in a town 30 or so miles. I drove past the turn off to the local police department. There was a police car pulling out and got right behind me. He followed me right up my chuff (British for on my ass) for a mile or 2 and pulled me over. Here's where it's kind of funny, or would be were it not so damn expensive. He asks for whatever documentation they ask for.

He says, "Your registration is expired, were you aware of that?" I said, "Really? I had no idea." Which was true, I really had no clue. I got some bad info from a friend that told me you don't need to change registration if you come to Vermont. Yeah well that was bogus. In any event $162.00 dollars later I figured I better do something.

Here is my dilemma: I have a moral and spiritual imperative NOT to own or drive a motor vehicle. Yet in the time I've been in Vermont I have found a tremendous sense of freedom in the ability to drive and get out of the social podunk in which I have been living. Listen up Durango, you are a major metropolitan area in relation.

 It feels like an albatross hanging round my neck. Or maybe it's more like a monkey on my back. I'm like a junky when I put gas in it. AND I still owe a few bucks on it (stupid financial decision in the first place). So now it's parked, my access to the rest of the state is limited to cycling (Oh darn) or taking a bus. I did take our little local county bus ride a few hamlets over to get to my other office. I brought my bike, it was nice and cost a buck. Cheaper than driving. Oh but I had to wait to get on, take some twisty, windy ass route through the beautiful country side I watched roll by out the window as it passed. I'd never been able to just watch before. Ha ha ha.. There some irony.

But wait there is more still. While perusing Face Book and weeding through the pretzel bodied yoga freaks; or why cannabis cures cancer and trendy hipsters with huge piercings of that flap of skin in front of the mandible so you can see someones teeth. Who thinks that shit up? Remember those weird scenes from the city folk in the Hunger Games? But I digress.

Among all that crap, there are the news stories about mayhem, chaos and general barbarism in various locales around the planet. I don't mean to excuse any of them AND more importantly, it does cause me a great deal of pain and sadness. That's because whether directly or indirectly, I am partly the cause. And this gets back to cars. There are roughly one billion cars on the planet right now and thousands more are added every day. Those cars require an incredible amount of natural resources to build and keep moving. Minerals, petroleum and other essentials are not gently culled from the earth. They are violently extracted. And the places most affected are often the most impoverished, polluted and war torn.  It all boils down to economics. Here is a map for example:

Followed by a link to a web site:

 http://whowhatwhy.com/2014/07/23/gaspipe-diplomacy-how-ukraine-opened-the-door-to-new-u-s-russian-energy-fight/

What does Russia really want? You decide for yourself what's true.

Ultimately it's not just my bank account that is affected by my own driving it's the unseen cost hidden in a world rife with violence.

So, what do I do? I have faced this dilemma before and in the end my decision is going to be a drop in a bucket the size of the hole we'd need to dig in order to bury all those cars. 
Is this blog post going to help? Probably not but at least I'm thinking about it and how to find a solution.

Stay tuned and thanks for reading this.