staying angry at the right people
In this issue:
KonMari-ing my car rage
Simping for good legislation
I got in one of my little moods again yesterday.
It was 60 degrees. The sun was out. I was biking home from the gym, full of those good exercise brain juices and choosing to enjoy the unseasonable weather instead of letting it pitch me into a pit of existential dread. My route takes me past a school, and I just so happened to be heading home right around pickup time. This meant that I biked by at least a hundred parked cars—most of them were SUVs with a single occupant, and at least 25% were idling.
A few minutes later, I got home just as a neighbor pulled out of the alley behind our homes. The area reeked of exhaust, a clear sign that she’d been idling for a significant amount of time before driving off. The fumes were so powerful that I had to pull my shirt over my mouth to avoid coughing. By then my mood had taken a severe downward turn.
I hate it when people do this. I hate it so much.
My state is kind of a joke when it comes to the climate—we have increasingly unacceptable air quality in the summer, largely thanks to transportation. The EPA slapped my region on the wrist for “severe” ozone standard violations in 2022. But instead of building better infrastructure or investing in transit, our government’s just like, “Hey, let’s add another lane to the highway.”
The simple act of moving from one location to the other requires inflicting atmospheric violence on the people around us. If I want to go on a hike, my only reasonable option is to drive to the trailhead. To pump a little more poison into the air. To spray a little more shrapnel from my tires and the road into my community’s lungs. That sucks!
But you know what sucks even more? People pumping out that poison for no reason whatsoever. When the weather is fine, when you have nowhere to be, when people are walking their literal babies in strollers right past your exhaust pipe, I can only view your choice to keep the engine running as a direct assault on your neighbors. Idling your car in ideal windows-down conditions is the emissions equivalent of a mall ninja swinging nunchucks around in a crowded area: It’s dangerous and you look ridiculous.
If I were even an inch more confrontational by nature, I might slap a passive aggressive message on the windshield of every idler I passed; something like “Thanks for poisoning the air, idiot” or “Great job, you just made ski season even shorter.”
But if I were a few inches more critical and reasonable, I might remember that I’m not really mad at these SUV moms. They may be making an obnoxious, harmful choice in the moment, but it’s not their fault that the choice was available to them in the first place.
Where my anger really belongs is with the companies that make the cars, the billionaires who sell the gas, and the politicians who value these people’s profits over my future and my community’s health. I’m angry at every Coloradan elected official who, over the decades, has failed to push for any kind of transit system that can reasonably replace cars. I’m angry at car manufacturers that have made dangerous trucks and SUVs the new norm on our streets and at federal legislators who have let it happen. I’m furious, just fuming and blind, every time I remember how many powerful people capable of making something beautiful and good for this planet have instead chosen to open another wound.
As the saying goes, “The earth is not dying, it is being killed, and those who are killing it have names and addresses.”
I know that the people watching Reels while their car runs are not, at the end of the day, the ones holding the knife. But it would still be great if they’d stop doing that.
On that note
Some Colorado senators have introduced a sick bill that would establish a grant program for communities to fund infrastructure projects aimed at improving safety by—get this—imposing a weight-based fee on personal vehicles.
I love this so much. The big expensive trucks and SUVs doing the most human and environmental damage to our communities should absolutely bear more of the cost that we collectively shoulder. If you live in Colorado, you can write to your state senator and the governor asking them to support this—here’s a link with a template and everything.
If you’re not convinced, this video helps illustrate why those of us already predisposed to think ill of cars have a special vitriol reserved for huge trucks and SUVs (short version: they’re killing us).
That’s all for this letter! Thank you for reading.
Now Is Long grows exclusively by word of mouth; you can help it reach more people by sharing this email with a friend who could use a gentle reminder to turn their car off when it’s not going anywhere.