D.B.Tarpley's Amazing Ass Blog-5/10/18

Greetings and salutations people and peoplettes,

Feeling kind of weary this morning. For some reason I can’t stop thinking about all the drivers out there. We are a society full of people with cars. And sometimes that is a very dangerous thing… a people and a car.

Every once in a while I will stop and think of this and have a mini panic attack. Nearly everyone in our society of age owns a car. And all these people and personalities are out there on the roads at all times of the day. That’s millions of moving metal coffins whizzing by one another on thin roads with nothing but arbitrary lines to guide the way rocketing towards one another like bats out of Hell with a mere two foot gap between them.

Millions!

I think about this and I get the shakes, my body will literally begin to shake. I think this may be because nearly three years ago I dozed a bit while driving and slowly slid over into the oncoming lane of traffic only to wake up at the last minute and veer a hard right, barely missing a head on with a huge black pickup truck (I’m not racist, the truck just happened to be black.)

We came so close to hitting head on that our driver’s side mirrors high-fived one another as we passed. (Actually, mine high-fived and his went into some complicated slick handshake that… you know what, never mind… we almost hit is all you need to know.)

Now I don’t want my words to give you the shakes too. I just find it statistically improbable given the human condition and especially with today’s presentation of constant distractions that there isn’t a series of horribly bloody wrecks every second of every day.

A two foot gap!

And there is nothing but our brain’s ability to calculate distance which keeps us on the extremely thin straight and narrow. The lines on the road are merely suggestions… illusions of propriety. It seems it would take a person who is persistent, diligent, and even headed for safe driving conditions to be had.

Have you met people lately?

Persistent, diligent, and even headed they are not.

My near collision was nothing but an unconscious blip. The non-deliberate slip of a nanosecond. But think about all the angry people out there who might force an emotionally charged crash at the drop of a dime.

In January of 1991 I had such an emotionally charged event. I was driving down a country highway in a stolen Army recruiter’s car because, long story short… I stole an Army recruiter’s car. I had just stole some gas as well and been chased by the station owner and knew the cops would be on my tail shortly; so I picked up an old hitchhiker thinking 2 in the car would better disguise my vehicle. The cop passed me, hit his lights, and spun back around. My ‘guest’ said, “Hey man, I think they’re coming for you.” To which I replied, “Oh. I know they are.”

(Old hitchhiker eyes get real wide when they are scared.)

I sped along my merry way through one roadblock, ditching my tail at extremely rapid speeds until I came screeching into a rolling stop, tires turning rubber into smoke as I slammed on the breaks from 90 to 10 in a small town square. My ‘guest’ waved his thanks, hopped out of my moving car, and left the door open as he hit the ground running. I leaned over as I accelerated, hardly missing a beat and closed the door as I sped out the other side of town.

That day I led police on a chase through three counties and three roadblocks until I hit the fourth doing 135 miles an hour, not bad for an ‘87Chevrolet Celebrity. I was coming down a hill, trying to clear the right side of the roadblock, never slowing down. I hit the side of the cop car, bounced sideways into a ditch, slid to the end of the ditch on my side until the nose of my car rammed into the end causing the entire vehicle to flip tail over nose three times in the air until I finally landed static on my tires.

I wasn’t wearing my seatbelt. My hands reflexively rose up and took most of the blunt trauma slamming into the windshield. My body was then tossed back and forth like a ragdoll between the front and back seat until the end. I remember raising my head in the back seat spitting glass out of my mouth. I later found out I came within inches of losing my right eye and my nose was torn almost completely off needing emergency reconnective surgery. But other than that I was fine. No broken bones.

The overall point of this being that cars can be very dangerous things in the wrong hands. I had basically used it as a moving missile with little to no regard for my life or the lives of others. The arresting officers were none too pleased with me and I believe I am still not welcome in any of those counties.

An emotional driver is a dangerous driver.

Millions of people… certainly a couple of them are emotional from time to time.

And none of this is ever discussed. We all just go on with our lives living this unspoken pact that everything is going to be OK and that there is nothing to worry about. I mean there are a million and one things in life which can kill us but our socially evolved norm of transportation is culprit number one. Why haven’t we as a society come up with something better?

I’ll tell you why but you aren’t going to like it.

Or maybe you will. I don’t know. You could be a horrible person and as such prone to liking horrible things.

The reason our automotive industry is the way it is revolves mainly around profit. Duh, right? But it is a socially accepted greed which perpetuates an industry which is, at its core, unnecessary. The manufacturers want everyone to have a car… multiple cars in fact. In fact they want everyone to get a brand new car every 5 to 7 years. This is the only way they can keep their manufacturing facilities profitable enough to remain running year round. They also build deliberate defects into their cars, which of course cause ‘X’ number of accidents each year, so that customers are forced before they are due to get a new vehicle. With the technology we possess at this moment in time we should easily be able to develop a car which is cheap and durable enough to last fifty years, one which doesn’t run on the money pit that is gasoline.

But that is not profitable. The car and oil industries run deliberate interference between the technology and the consumer to keep that money flowing in. They literally buy up patents to shelve them. In addition to this their deliberate defects and shoddy design habits essentially murder thousands of people a year.

How do they get away with this? They apply the classic capitalist formula which doubles as justification: If the collective number of settlements from lawsuits is significantly lower than the number which profits from these actions generates then the actions are acceptable and will continue.

Lives? We doan need no stinkin lives.

Not where money is concerned. We could all be whisked away to work each day by cheap, plastic, aerodynamic, solar powered, self-driven bubbles which leave our houses and link up with long trains of similar bubbles headed in the same direction… if only that were making someone money.

And twenty years from now we may.

Until then we will have to go on pretending everything is just hunky dory when it comes to joining the throngs of idiots out there jerking their metal coffins to and fro down suggestively painted roads.

Try not to shake.

Try harder…

Now go have yourself an amazingly safe ass day.