Seeing Red over Green Hypocrisy

I am not a fashionable person. In fact, if you were to ask me anything about modern culture the best I could offer up would be a blank stare and/or vacant expression. It is an affliction I wear proudly.

Last night I was at a small party with a fairly standard array of folk as befits a middle class Sydney social scene. I met a chap who proclaimed with great pomposity how he had recently purchased a Toyota Prius hybrid motor vehicle. He had decided to "do away with the old gas guzzler and help save the environment" by driving an icon of the dedicated non-thinker. "What do you drive Dan?" came the inevitable query and never in my life did I have a greater wish to say "A two door muscle car with a huge V8, detuned so that it runs extra rich because I love seeing the smoke coming out the back". Unfortunately, this would have been a lie and I explained that I rode a Vespa GT200. "That's great," proclaimed the fool, " you and I are on the same wavelength". We certainly were not !

Environmental issues have unfortunately become a fashionable vice for some rather vile people. Only in the last ten years or so have I seen just how much damage hypocritical people and organisations have done once they hijacked the "green" message. Now all of a sudden everything sold has an "environmentally friendly" angle attached to it. The problem is that there is no regulation and it can be applied to basically ANYTHING. Let me just state this now, no matter what anyone says, the Toyota Prius is NOT an environmentally friendly car. The batteries alone have some rather nasty substances in them, and it still burns petrol. People like the village idiot I met last night are hypocrites, fools and bores. Go away and take your falsely cleared conscious with you !

I wonder if it will ever be possible for people to conduct their lives in such a way where they reduce their negative impact on the environment and not feel the need to promote the fact to everyone within earshot.

Todays shout out goes to scientific research. This is where the solutions to our environmental problems will be found.

Todays shout down goes to the chap I met last night. Sorry, but I didn't catch your name, most probably because I didn't care what it was.

"The Broken Windows of the Greenhouse Effect", by Dan the VespaMan.

We all like to think,
That we are saving the world,
But maybe we should think more,
About how the truth gets hurled.

Go drive your hybrids,
Your false green moral,
Keep it to yourself,
Rather than display it as a laurel.