As I was working on a genealogy profile early this morning, I was drawn to search for a death notice published in the Detroit Free Press in 1996. Although I was unsuccessful in my endeavor, I came upon a retrospective article marking the fact that the American Auto Industry turns 100 this year (1996).
Never in modern history has one invention been so impactful to so many and yet so damaging to our environment. Paved roads heat the planet, smog chokes our breathing, accidents happen that take their toll on the lives of families, and our finances and their remnants sit in museums, garages, driveways, on the side of the road, and in junks yards that litter our country. And besides gas, all of the fluids that support running any vehicle are poison to humans as well-coolant, brake fluid, wiper fluid, transmission fluid, battery acid. Engineering allows us to drive around "safely". Until one brilliantly stupid human does yet another thing no one has thought of before to screw it all up for the rest of us.
And here we are now in 2022, 26 years later and we, as a country, are being weaned off of the gasoline teat because Russia supplies a significant amount of crude to the world oil market and they are at war with Ukraine. Don't forget, we have to "save the planet" and ourselves. Crude oil is a byproduct of the dinosaur age and it's a finite resource and expensive. Barrels of the stuff are refined into any number of fluid products and plastics! (that get thrown away in landfills and microparticles get into our oceans and our food chain and not enough is recycled further polluting the earth, but that's a different bandwagon). We still buy gas every day we need it, but we seem to need it a little less when it's priced at $6.35 per gallon.
California has had to put into effect some of the strictest clean air quality legislation to get the smog under control in this freeway-driving car culture society we live in, but the rest of the country hasn't caught up yet.
The rub is that if electric generating plants are being fueled by coal, are all those EV electric plug-in vehicles really making a difference in our quality of life? Not for the people who live in the vicinity of a smokey coal-burning plant. Even the by-products of a cleaner coal-burning plant ( no coal plant can ever be 100% clean for the environment), are not healthy for the groundwater. And everybody has to drink water. An EV car is still a car, just without a gas tank.
We can thank the industrial revolution for making our lives what they are today.
But are humans the evasive species of planet earth? How long will it be till we have to colonize outer space or another planet to sustain our existence? I would like to be able to think positively about it, but an almost 2-year bout of COVID-19 in society proves to me that 1) humans can't stand to be cooped up in one place over a long period of time, and; 2) no one gets out of here alive. And now that mother nature has "thinned the herd" with yet another mutating virus, there are fewer of us on this planet. You'd think it would be easier, but it's just the same bunch of problems on a different day.
The baby boomers have kicked down the road the fact that social security won't be there for my generation, that there are not enough immigrants and locals willing to take low-paying thankless jobs in home healthcare for the elderly. And now the conservatives in the Supreme Court just took away the federal constitutional mandate for abortion rights. I think if you are a woman and not of breeding age, you have no right to tell me what I can and can't do with my body. If you're a man, and don't believe in abortion, you better believe in adoption because that number will only rise when it comes to states rights and the poor.
President Biden is right when he said this November, you'll be voting for the people that want gun control and abortion rights.
We need to make ammunition expensive as hell because that's what actually kills people. Have all the guns you want, but if a bullet is $200 each, with a serial number and your name is attached to the purchase, you might think again about using it to kill another human being.
