A Pilgrim’s Digression

Ordinarily, this would not be worthy of note, but last Thursday as I was driving home on I-395 S out of Washington, I saw a brand new Toyota Sequoia. It still had the paper tags, the bright sheen, and the dark, shiny black tires of a car that had just been driven off the lot.

The Sequoia is one of the largest SVUs on the market, second maybe to the Hummer H2. And just as an aside, let me ask you, when was the last time you saw a Hummer on the road? I can’t recall, personally, which only highlights the unusualness of seeing a brand new SVU on the highway, stalled in traffic on a major urban roadway.

So I am sitting there in my car, looking across at this vehicle, and I start thinking, “Who in their right mind buys an enormous SVU these days, with gas prices what they are?”

I really don’t know how to answer that question. The person driving the Sequoia was a young man, probably in his mid-twenties. I try to imagine his conversation with the car salesman.

“Boy the price of gas is something else, isn’t it?” The car salesman says. “$3.69 a gallon over there at the Shell station, and that’s cheap! Would you like to look at one of our compact cars, or maybe a hybrid?”

“No,” the young man says, “I want your biggest, most energy inefficient SVU on the lot.”

I think that would probably confuse even the most cutthroat car salesman, for a moment. But he’d be right back on target in no time. He probably hasn’t sold an SVU in months, and here comes this sucker…

“Well, let me show you our Sequoia, Sir,” he says, an evil gleam in his eye.

“What engine does it have in it?”

“This has our biggest engine, a V-8. We make no concessions to fuel economy with this baby! The Miles per Gallon is so low, it’s almost in the negative. We don’t even list it on the sticker.”

“What size is the gas tank?”

“We’ve got a 27 gallon tank on this guzzler.”

“Hm,” the young man says. “That’ll cost me $99.63 to fill up, each time I go to the pump.”

“And gas prices are only going up!” The salesman says.

“That’s exactly what I want to hear! I’ll take it.”

Idiot. Really, what goes through someone’s head who buys one of these things?

I don’t consider myself any kind of rabid anti-internal combustion engine environmentalist. If a person wants to buy a vehicle like a Sequoia, that’s their business. But I am free to criticize them as a moron.

Maybe some people have excess money and the price of gas makes no difference to them. Maybe some people have large families to transport. In researching the Sequoia, I came across this Yahoo! Answers question, “What is the largest SUV you can buy currently?“, in which the person asking the question says that they have eight or nine family members to transport.

And then there was this story today about the Christian music singer, Steven Chapman, whose daughter was struck and killed by an SVU. The kicker in that story is that the SVU, a Toyota Land Cruiser, was driven by the singer’s teenage son, who apparently did not see the girl and ran over her in their driveway. Chapman has three biological children and three adopted children, so yes, I suppose I can see the point in having an SVU.

However, (and oh boy this is really going to sound mean) I think having six, eight, or nine children is absolutely irresponsible, and yes, moronic. No one needs ten kids to work our farmland, the way our ancestors did.

And have you noticed it’s always some devout Christian or Mormon family that produces these large broods of beautiful little brats? Every once in awhile on the news, there will be a story about some large family and how they “cope” with the challenges they face. These stories always anger me, almost as much as the stories about women who take fertility treatments, give birth to quintuplets like some sow in a sty, and then go on TV so that other morons will donate money and merchandise to her and her husband to offset the cost of their stupidity.

I think the largest family I’ve seen profiled in one of these stories about large families was two parents and sixteen children. The children literally slept in a bunkhouse, almost like a military style barracks. To fix breakfast for this tribe every day, the mother and her daughters would rise before dawn to cook three dozen eggs, several pounds of bacon, and bake dozens of biscuits. And the mother–again, a perfect moron, and a Christian–said she wanted more children “if it is God’s will.”

Someone needs to tell these people that God hasn’t anything to do with the human reproductive system. God doesn’t make that woman lie on her back and spread her legs for her idiot of a husband. If God does play a part in getting a woman pregnant, condoms and pink pills can quite easily thwart God’s will.

I’m rather off the subject of the price of a gallon of gas, but the topics are related. There is an attitude in this country that individuals should be free to do as they please, consume as much as they want, spend as much as they want, because this is America, goddamnit, and we don’t tell any of our citizens what to do! Unless, of course, they want to smoke marijuana, marry someone of the same gender, or refuse to wear a flag lapel pin.

I am not even suggesting this attitude needs to be changed by government fiat (even if it could be changed, which it can’t). I am merely an observer of the follies of human nature. Human nature often compels us, all of us (even me) towards self-destruction. Yes, I define spawning sixteen kids to be self-destructive, selfishly self-destructive, even, because those parents probably never considered whether all their children would be happy living in a small military-style encampment under Old Testament patriarchal rule. It was very selfish of those parents to have that many children, merely to fulfill some idea of their own devout virtuousness.

Well, you ask, how does it affect me if some zealot wants to reproduce like a fucking rabbit? How does it affect me if some moron buys a Toyota Sequoia? It doesn’t affect me, not really, unless the family with sixteen kids is receiving some sort of State benefits for their fecundity; or unless the purchase of each Sequoia directly results in the consumption of enough fuel over the course of the vehicle’s lifetime to heat Rhode Island for the winter.

These are just the kinds of things I observe that drive me absolutely nuts. I am probably a mean-spirited person, by most standards. I often take pleasure in other people’s pain, but only people I don’t like, or people who are morons. I find myself guiltily amused by the tragedy of Steven Chapman’s daughter’s death. Don’t get me wrong, I feel bad for the little girl. She was only five, and no one deserves to die so young. It’s always a tragedy.

Yet there is a part of me that sees the ironic side to the story. She was run over in her driveway by her brother in the family Land Cruiser, because he didn’t see her. Maybe he didn’t see her BECAUSE HE WAS IN A FUCKING LAND CRUISER. And why did the Chapman family own a Land Cruiser? Because they had six kids to haul around.

This is America, so they are perfectly free to do whatever they want. They can have six kids, own a Land Cruiser, whatever. Freedom often has some hidden costs, however, and in this case the cost was the life of a little girl.