Change Isn't Necessarily Progress

From Vogue Magazine: How Men's Fashion Changed for the Better This Year.

I live in a small town in Maine. I'm talking a really small town, population 8,737 as of the 2020 census. When you think about it, what happens here in Freeport impacts the world's problems not one teeny, tiny bit. Still, the "town leaders" -- those kids who were class president or treasurer in high school and liked it and so ran for office as adults and got elected to the Town Council -- take themselves and their jobs very seriously .

It's good to have a hobby, we can all agree. But when your hobby is telling other people what they can or cannot do, it's obnoxious. For example, the latest edict to come down from the Climate Action Committee appointed by the Council is the demand that by 2030, 23% of all cars in the town are electric vehicles.  The other 77% can be gas-powered, pollution-belching, global-warming jalopies or what have you, but 23% will have to be electric. A hired sustainability coordinator suggested we adopt certain goals, one being to cut our carbon use by 64% and one of the ways we could achieve that is by the 23% EV goal. 

Personally, I don't want an electric car for several reasons, but mostly because they're dumb. You have to plug them in overnight and if you forget then you're dead in the water the next morning. I can barely remember to charge my phone overnight and I'm pretty sure I'd forget to charge my car. And even if I do remember, I can only go so far before I'll have to charge it again, and that's not very far. My gasoline-powered Audi can go 545 miles on a full tank without stopping if I were say, running from the police.  An EV can get between 110 and 300 miles, and only if you can find a place to re-charge.

But the real reason I don't want an EV is because it's just too damn woke. I want nothing to do with all this "progress" we are supposedly making. IMHO, things were better when men looked more like Paul Newman than Joanne Woodward. And when our president was young and vigorous, or even old and vigorous like Ronald Reagan, who at least had the decency to wait until he was out of office before he got Alzheimer's.