A troop-supporting SUV driver stopped at a Homeland
Security checkpoint on I-87 near Lake Placid, New York.

We went on a camping trip earlier this week. It's good to get out of New York City in the summer. When you visit a place like the Adirondacks you discover that the stuff you've been breathing here in the city is a mere facsimile of the gaseous substance commonly known as "air." You also discover that New York City isn't quite America. Out there in the vast, baking deserts of strip-mall asphalt, there's a whole culture underway that we New Yorkers are mostly separate from. If I haven't ventured to the mainland in a while, I almost always find something that surprises or amazes me a little bit.

This road trip, I found myself taken by the vast proliferation of "Support our Troops" and "God Bless the USA" stickers afixed to Americans' motor vehicles. They were all over the upstate highways and parking lots, at least as common as the ubiquitous pine tree airfreshner. There also seemed to be a direct correlation between the size of the vehicle and the likelihood that it sported one of these stickers. The more gigantic and grotesque the vehicle, the more likely it begged for your support and blessings.

If anything represents the deep disconnect in American life today, it's got to be a "support the troops" sticker plastered to the back of a single-passenger vehicle burning 7 miles to the gallon. Obviously, if these folks really supported their troops, one of the first things they'd do is get rid of their gas-guzzler. Americans live a sprawled-out, energy-intensive way of life that is made possible, almost completely, by a vast, steady flow of inexpensive oil. Sixty percent of our petroleum comes from foreign lands, and this supply is increasingly limited and contested. If we want to maintain our high-consumption way of life as is, without changing it one iota, then we are going to have to do things like the war in Iraq. It's actually pretty simple. Those gas guzzlers with the "support the troops" stickers on the back are one of the main reasons why we need troops stationed in the Middle East, alongside our most important global gas stations.

I want to know: Is it really worth it to you? If you understood the connection between your guzzler and the troops required to keep it rolling would you get rid of the guzzler? Would you start working to make your community and your lifestyle less automobile-dependent? I've got to think that if our national leadership and automobile ad-supported media started talking about the dangers and consequences of our oil dependence and the steps we need to take to begin to break out of our addiction, Americans would respond. I have to think this because the alternative is too bleak.

Seeing the bounty of ribbons stickered to these absurd, cartoonish vehicles it was hard not to think about the alternative: Perhaps, in fact, Americans do understand the connection between their SUV's and their troops perfectly clearly. And we've made a decision. We've decided that blood for oil is actually not such a bad deal. We support the troops because, look around -- the troops make all this possible. The troops enable us to continue to live our American way of life however we want, regardless of what our lifestyle means to the rest of the planet, our next door neighbor, or even our own personal health and happiness. Maybe we've decided that we're OK with that.

But even that's a little too cynical for me. I think you've got to have faith in the American people. Hopefully we just haven't been asked to think about these issues a whole lot up to now. Soon enough, we'll start to connect the dots.

4:06 PM | Link |