What we say about ourselves on our cars

Every morning I park behind these two cars.

The one on the right has a sign that says, “I believe in fairies.” The one on the left has a plate frame that says, “To close for missiles, switching to guns.” And I don’t understand either one. It’s such a juxtaposition.

I’m like, I don’t get it. I don’t get either one of them. Does she really believe in fairies or is it just some sort of ironic commentary on our political times? Maybe she doesn’t really believe in fairies but wishes she could? Is it supposed to be funny? Or maybe just unique?

The one about guns – is this just some sort of he-man macho meaningless statement, or is there something more subtle that I’m missing? Is it funny? Is it clever?

I finally ran into the owner of the missiles-to-guns car and I asked him. What does it mean? So he tried to explain that missiles go further than guns. Yeah I know that, but…so? Why did you put that on the back of your car? (I didn’t quite ask it that way, but almost).  Apparently, it’s a “if you can read this you’re too close”, back off and quit tailgating statement. Okay, I was just wondering.

Then I saw a bumper sticker that I thought was funny (sorry, no photo, I was driving). It said, “My other car is my motorcycle that don’t run.” I took that as a little bit of self-depreciatory humor, and I laughed. But then I got to thinking about it and I’m like, hmmm, maybe not? The rapidly widening economic gap – and the misconceptions about the cultural differences of the haves and have nots – is causing a big problem in our country. And it’s maybe not so funny after all.

I momentarily wished we were back in simpler times. But those times weren’t much simpler. I grew up in logging country when that industry was in massive decline. Hundreds of square miles of beautiful forestlands had been decimated, leaving bald hills and enormous clear-cut scars through the entire northwest. This prompted understandable pushback. But imposing limits to logging meant poverty for a huge percentage of the local population. One bumper sticker I remember from back then went, “Hug a logger – you’ll never go back to trees.” This bumper sticker did point to the class differences in that debate – but I like to imagine that it did so in a reasonably friendly manner.

It’s ironic, speaking of the role of trees, that we’re belatedly realizing that our earth is getting too hot and now they are talking about ways to use trees to recapture the CO2 we’ve been dumping into the atmosphere. One way is to plant a bunch of trees (a really big bunch of trees), and let them soak up the CO2. Then instead of releasing the CO2 back again as the trees die and decay, burn the trees for fuel and capture the CO2 while burning them. Then somehow sequestering the captured CO2, perhaps by pumping it back into the ground where it came from. It’s a complicated, expensive idea that would take huge amounts of land. But I gather we’re going to have to do some sort of expensive CO2 removal, because it’s basically too late to just cut emissions, even if we all stopped using any fossil fuels at all, starting this very moment.

Well, I don’t want to end this post on an end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it topic. So here’s something cute I saw on a car at lunch today; a vanity license plate that read, “Gampa”. Awwww! That’s exactly how they say it too!