Cars Are No Longer Cool

Fifty years ago, long before the first signs or hints of climate change and peak oil production, the American auto industry was just plain cool. Each year, the big auto makers rolled out their new models, those sleek, shiny, oil-hungry machines of tomorrow that every Tom, Dick, and Jane longed to drive around town in and show off in their driveways. Owning a car, and more importantly, owning a car that was the envy of your neighbors, was as much a part of the American Dream as buying your own home and earning a decent wage.

That was then, this is now. In the balmy May days in the year of our Fictitious Lord, 2010, any American who still thinks automobiles with oil-burning engines under the hoods are cool is another kind of cool altogether: an uncool fool.

America is filled with uncool fools who still get excited about the latest models of ozone-killing cars coming out of Ford-inspired factories, who still drool over the designs of freshly-minted autos on display in the showrooms and convention halls of America's bankrupt cities, and who still think its oh so cool to glamorize and subsidize man-made machines depleting the world of fossil fuel while spewing carbon monoxide emissions in all directions and building a deadly greenhouse designed to perfection for the ultimate destruction of all humankind.

A bit of a stretch? Crazy conspiracy talk? I think not. Sorry, no, these aren't the rantings of an environmental nut job, but rather the warnings of yet another ahead-of-his-time Homo sapiens who knows the truth when he sees it. Cars are killing the planet. Autos, and the auto-making corporations that build them, are getting away with murder. And millions of brainwashed Americans, the gung-ho, gas-guzzling, pedal-pushing, car-idolizing, ATV-riding, SUV-speeding, auto-preview loving Nimrods of the Great American Delusion, are still buying.

According to the Worldwatch Institute, the Earth is home to an estimated 530 million cars. That's a lot of exhaust pipes spilling poisonous fumes into the atmosphere. Yet, even in today's modern scientific times, in the 21^st century in the year of our Mythological Messiah, 2010, towns, cities, and churches everywhere are topped off with dumb folks duped into to believing that cars built the old-fashioned way are a good and proper ingredient in the recipe of American innovation, drive, and success.

People are afraid to look ahead. They're afraid to see the future, much less to think about it. They want to believe supporting the Big Three automakers is the good and proper American thing to do. They want to believe in their cock-and-bull stories even if it means killing themselves, their children, and the planet in the process.

Internal combustion engines are chocking the life out of our planet. Oil-driven engines are the worst thing that ever happened to modern public transportation, but continue to thrive as the sexy personal transit vehicles marketing executives have seductively hard-wired into the shortsighted consciousness of an easily-manipulated American public.

Worldometers, a website with "world statistics updated in real time", reports that according to the International Organization of Motor Vehicle Manufacturers, some 50 million passenger cars were produced worldwide in 2009. In 2010, many of the world's cars are being made in Germany, Japan, China, and the United States. Although global car sales are down, OCIA projects the same number of cars, 50 million or so, to be produced in 2010.

That way too many cars, and cars are no longer cool. They may look, sound, and feel cool, but they're death machines in disguise. The gas-guzzling, environmentally-antiquated vehicles of today are still reeking havoc on the planet and spelling doom for future Jetsons of tomorrow. We need a new direction, a new way of transporting ourselves to and from the daily destinations in our lives. And unless we start making cars totally uncool, soon there might not be any more places on the planet Earth left to drive to.