Today begins the one weekend every year when I feel that I am being a hypocrite.
Why?
Because it is Back to the 50’s Weekend in Roseville, Minnesota. Because every other moment of the summer I am doing my best to ride my bike instead of driving any time I can. Because this weekend, no matter how gorgeous the weather is for biking, I will be driving my ’76 Volkswagen Beetle to work to part next to my dad’s ’62 Chevy Panel truck so it is there for all the other car people to see, to ask me how I painted it, and numerous other questions. For people to tell me “That’s cool!”
I fully believe that we need to work on not being dependent on oil, not being dependent on driving, all of that. I’ve visited places with awesome public transportation systems, where you hardly need to think about having a car, and certainly don’t need it for getting to work every day. I truly believe we need to work towards that without a doubt.
But for this one weekend every year, I’m right there with my dad and so many others being excited over cars, and engines, and paint jobs, and the sounds of motors revving. I can’t help it.
It does make me wonder though…
With all that needs to be done to change our habits with driving and what cars run on, etc. What would happen if the people in power asked more of these car people what they should do? I’ve listened to many of these people talk – many of them are geniuses when it comes to cars. Quite a few of them I know, when they need a special part and they can’t readily find it, they just machine it themselves. Make it out of nothing. What would happen if you had a bunch of people like that in on figuring out the mess we are in? Perhaps a motor that could run on something other than gasoline and could easily be swapped into any car on the road (when you hear how many different cars you can put a standard Chevy motor in, you can really believe this!) I know I would do quite a bit to make it so I could keep driving my little Beetle. I’m sure there are many that feel the same.
Enough of my little soap box.
I just wanted to apologize for being a hypocrite this weekend. I hope you can forgive me. Also, if you’re in to that kind of thing, there will be photos of old cars up on my photo blog very soon I’m sure.
~Peace~