Self Justification

Last night I watched The World's Fastest Indian since it was on telly and had been recommended to me previously. What a brilliant film! Mostly due to it being packed full of 1960's American cars. Gorgeousness. Fins and chrome and big curvy, sweeping windscreens make a car as far as I'm concerned. I couldn't care less about fuel economy, reliability, compression ratios or how quickly it can go from 0 to 100 – I just want it to look good.

I occasionally feel guilty about driving a 47 year old car that doesn't have catalytic converters and only gets about 19 miles to the gallon (that's about 6km per litre) in terms of contributing to pollution and my carbon footprint blah blah. But I only use about 30 litres of petrol a week which is way less (I think) than all those big four wheel drive things. And another thing to consider is that very little industrial manufacturing has been required to support my vehicle in 47 years! My car has used tyres, oil, petrol and coolant and no other consumables or new parts in 47 years. I think that makes up for the fumes. Imagine if everybody kept their cars for 50 years, took on their parent's cars and just kept them going. That is a very high form of recycling, and imagine the environmental savings of not pumping out 50 squillion new cars every year. AND even better, we would all look very, very cool. But what about the car industry - its high levels of employment, and general contribution to the economy? Personally, I don't care, but if whole economies are going to collapse because people stop buying new cars then I guess it's an issue. Green backs before green trees. Tell that to the frogs.

As I get older and more jaded I become less concerned about trying to solve world problems. When I was a teen/early twenties I was very devout politically. I would go to demonstrations, I would shop politically, buy organically grown produce, ride my bike everywhere, only use vinegar and baking soda as cleaning products. Then one day, standing in the supermarket trying to work out which canned tomatoes to buy it occurred to me that I shouldn't even be buying Australian made produce, given our record of human rights abuses with the indigenous folk. And I thought "fuck it". Was I making a difference with all my efforts? I certainly had good skin and great thighs from the healthy food and cycling but otherwise – did anything I do really matter? How was I to know if all my carefully sorted recycling was actually getting recycled or just going to land fill? So I gave up. From then on I have bought from whichever country gave the best quality or value and I buy my groceries at the regular market (saving myself about $100 a week in the process). My only remaining greeny behaviour is to buy free range eggs and chicken when possible and I still recycle my rubbish, compost kitchen scraps and divert grey water to the garden in summer.
But the car issue I am still passionate about. Most people these days drive around in cars made of plastic which isn't recyclable, produces all sorts of nasty by products during the manufacture and they change cars frequently. I don't know many people who drive a car that's more than 10 years old. It is ridiculous that it becomes more financially viable to buy a new one than to fix the old one. So they end up generating a car sized amount of land fill. If cars were made properly in the first place and made of durable materials (like metal) they would last a lifetime and beyond – as mine has done.
The other problem with modern cars is that people are so spoilt with power steering and ABS brakes and parking sensors and all that other stuff that the average person can't even really drive – they just steer. There are fewer thought processes involved, less skill. I wonder if this de-skilling of drivers is responsible for the ever increasing road toll or just the general idiocy and incompetence that we see on the roads on a daily basis. I can reverse park a big old car that requires decent biceps for turning the steering wheel – so why can't other people reverse park their tiny, light weight, power assisted plastic boxes? The less we are challenged, the less we continue to learn and grow. I never want to stop learning, stop developing as a sentient being. We all know what our final destination is so why not make the journey as interesting as possible? Learn how to reverse park, learn how to change a tyre, learn how to check your brakes and do an oil change. Get involved. No I'm not saving the world, I'm just saving an old car and learning a few things along the way. Sorry frogs.