No Fuel Like an Old Fuel

Staring at the overcast when they weren't actually raining skies for most of yesterday, seated on my porch watching all manner of vehicular traffic race up and down the street (the best thing about the broke-ass pavement we had for years in my neighborhood was it cut down on folks speeding. Those days am over now, by jingo, by gum.) made me realize how grateful I am to have a car. 

Let me bend your eye for a moment on the topic. The capital of the State of Connecticut, Hartford, is about an hour's drive from Norwich. I have no idea if you were to attempt a journey by 'mass transit', how you would do it but I daresay it'd take more than an hour and perhaps more than a day. I've read some interesting articles on the impact of the automobile on the American Way of Life (the right to keep and bear cars should have been included in the Bill of Rights, seriously). 

When you look at our older cities and neighborhoods anywhere across the nation, you can see from the center to the outskirts, like the rings of a tree, how the internal combustion engine became the infernal comedic device in so many instances, with us as the punchline.

If you don't think God has a keen sense of humor and a delightful sense of irony, why else would he have installed every insurance company known to man (and a couple to the beasts of the field, according to their logo) in and around our capital city making Hartford Ground Zero for the insurance industry? What a crack-up He is! Can I get an Amen (with a collision waiver? Alleluia!)

Ours is not a state, and this side of the Connecticut River most especially, not a region where relying on buses and trains gets you anything more than frostbite and long hours of travel. Sort of helps you get a better understanding of how people get addicted to a variety of controlled and uncontrolled substances--and you can make a short movie of mobility junkies, getting a hit off the gas pump--taking a deep drag off the high octane bong and snorting a line of Ultra 93. Talk about Mercury Blues.

In Connecticut, our idea of addressing issues like soaring energy costs and greenhouse gases is to build MORE roads, with more lanes so people can drive to where they're going even faster. As for arguments that an investment in mass transit will yield economic development benefits as well as improve our urban and suburban quality of life, we can't you hear you-we've turned the radio up. All the way to Eleven.
-bill kenny