Dr. Forbush Thinks
"The goal of making the world a better place is just a bit to abstract for them to understand the concept. These are the people who drive SUVs because they like big cars that will kill the little people who might choose to drive an economical hybrid. Better them rather than me, floats through the heads of these people."
So I guess you rely on the bus and your bicycle to get around since you care so much about global warming and making the world a better place. You and Al Gore. I heard he plans to get rid of his gas guzzling jet plane and start biking across America in order to peddle his doomsday message. I might have more faith in what he has to say about global warming if he would serve as an example.
It is true that an SUV causes more damage than a smaller vehicle does in the case of an accident. But liability insurance on an SUV costs only slightly more than it does on a smaller vehicle. How do I know? My insurance agent. There may be several reasons why the difference is minimal. It could be that small cars are driven by people who are risk takers. And SUV's are driven by people who are careful drivers. Think about it. Who do you typically see tooling around in SUV's? Soccer moms, of course! And most of them are law-abiding Christians and Republicans not likely to take chances on the road. Right? Who do you typically see tooling around in small cars? Young people who think they are invincible and can weave in and out of traffic without causing a problem. I have no idea if what I have just said is true. 
But why haven't you voiced a concern about all the trucks that are on our roads? Hadn't you noticed that in the past 15 to 20 years the number of trucks that are on our roads has exploded? I am serious when I say this, but I think these big trucks should either have designated lanes or their own highway systems. One of the reasons people buy SUV's is because of the truck traffic and the danger these trucks pose on the road to the rest of us. I hate waking up in the morning, looking at the front page of my newspaper and discovering that another one of these big rigs has made a pancake out of some small vehicle.
Here is something else I am serious about. I think it should be against the law to stick children in rinky-dink cars and then head out onto the highway with them. What good is a car seat in a vehicle that isn't much more substantial than the car seat itself?
Yes, I own an SUV. We bought it for safety and convenience reasons. It is easier to see what is happening on the road when you are sitting higher up which is the case in an SUV. It is easier on the back to take groceries out of a SUV than out of the trunk of a car. I don't know how many times I may have prevented damage to my back thanks to our SUV. We have been able to haul things in the back of our SUV that we could not in a regular car. We can get more people in our SUV than we can a regular car. A couple of winters
I got cut off in my comment below. To continue:
Yes, I own an SUV. We bought it for safety and convenience reasons. It is easier to see what is happening on the road when you are sitting higher up which is the case in an SUV. It is easier on the back to take groceries out of a SUV than out of the trunk of a car. I don't know how many times I may have prevented damage to my back thanks to our SUV. We have been able to haul things in the back of our SUV that we could not in a regular car. We can get more people in our SUV than we can a regular car. A couple of winters ago we had a lot of snow and frgid temperatures in our area and my many grandchildren had to walk to school which amounted to several blocks. I was able to drive them plus a few neighbor children in my gas guzzling SUV. So, rather than two or three cars transporting children to school during these bad weather days, there was just my SUV. I must assume that saved on gas. This would be true for soccer moms who use their SUV's to transport several children to games. It saves on gas.
We have had one accident in our SUV and it was the other person's fault. The woman, who was driving a small car, was not paying attention to what she was doing. Thankfully, no one was hurt. Other than that one accident which was not our fault, we have not killed any little people, who have chosen to drive an economical hybrid, with our BIG BAD SUV. Not a one. On top of that, we don't even put 10,000 miles a year on our SUV. What about the person who drives a hybrid and puts 20,000 or 30,000 on his hybrid? You have to consider those things, too, sir.
When you are presenting the truth, you need to present the whole truth as much as possible and not go cherry picking through it in order to support your point of view. But I like you anyway. 
SusieQ,
Somehow you leap in logic from my proclamation that SUVs damage the environment and damage the people that they hit to the conclusion that I need to ride a bus or ride a bike to and from any where that I choose to go. Well, that leap in logic isn’t at all logical. I lived in Europe for three years, and in those three years I was able to ride my bike to and from work every day and ride the bus or train just about any where that I wanted to go. We took our kids to Austria, Italy, Slovenia, France, Switzerland and Denmark via train to name a few places. We also met Americans who shipped their car to Europe where they paid four times the amount for a gallon of gas for the convenience to have their own car or SUV. Europeans mocked them behind their backs, but it didn’t phase them for they would rather be the pigish Americans that we have our reputation for being. But, there was no need to do this in the pedestrian friendly Europe.
On the other hand, in car friendly America we are almost forced into the situation where we need a car to get everywhere. Bus schedules are inconvenient and several transfers are needed to get anywhere that one wants to go. Government funds public transportation just enough that people try it once and they are disappointed with the problematic results. People are taught to love their big cars and government subsidized gas prices prove them right.
SUVs are actually trucks. At least they are trucks as far as the federal government is concerned. They got through the “truck” loophole in the law that allowed them to ignore the gas mileage issues passed in the 1970s. At the time no one imagined that the public would rather drive a big truck like vehicle than save money on fuel efficient cars. But, with cheap gas getting cheaper as inflation rose and gas prices stabilized, or fell in constant dollars tempted people to buy these things and further destroy our world. But many Americans with the live for today - fuck tomorrow mentality went right on adding to the problems of our world.
I was thinking about the Religious Right and their hatred of the environment. At first I thought about the obvious, they don’t care about our planet because the Rapture is just around the corner. But, I think it goes beyond this. The Religious Right is the extension of the Protestant reformation that was based on the rejection of rituals incorporated into the Catholic Church. Many of these rituals were incorporated into the Christian religion in an effort to merge the pagan culture with the Christian culture throughout Europe. And, pagan culture arose from the respect for nature and it built these rituals from this relationship. Modern paganism is an effort to reach out to this old relationship with nature.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the religious right is convinced that there is some link between paganism and respect for nature, and therefore their contempt for our planet may be based on their contempt for paganism - or any other
Religion for that matter.
Commenting by HaloScan
